H. Mijail's Blog

I went to the sky slopes, and arranged for a normal one hour session with an instructor. It had been about 15 years since I last skied and even then I had little experience; so even though I could manage myself, I could definitely use a little teaching. So the instructor came and asked what I wanted to learn. "Good question", I thought*. Feeling stupid, I asked what were the options. She offered skiing or snowboarding; from 0 or something specific, like turning or jumping or ... . I settled for rechecking the basics and building up from there. But that night I kept thinking about the question: what did I want to learn? I had never thought about snowboard; I started skiing when I was 15 without ever questioning or being questioned. I guess I was happy enough to just see snow. So I began googling and reading and watching videos. I already had the equipment for skiing, but in life you pay for things with money or with time, or with both if you're unlucky; I still could a...

(sounds better than Aikikizomba... ;P) The Bachaturo festival was not exactly very well organized. In fact if I had came from far away I guess I would be pretty pissed off. I've heard that last year it was much better, and that this edition was problematic because it had to be rescheduled after the Smolensk plane accident... Anyway, the high point for me has been Kwenda. He was funny and interesting just as a Kizomba teacher. But then it got stranger / more interesting: there was a class called "Kainzen Dance". Looks like that was a typo and the real name is "Kaizen" (shitty organization!). Sounded like something japanese, and I half assumed some Noh-style dance or similar (read: not interesting ;P ). So when I finally went in because some other class was overcrowded, ... surprise. Incense, and some mix of afro bodymovement and... exercises that reminded me the strangest Tai Chi class I had, so long ago. I wouldn't say I liked it (it felt a bit rushe...

3 months ago, I started a Salsa course.  In fact it was an unexpected and (supposedly) quick experiment. I had played percussion for some years in my hometown's music band; that was about 10 years ago. So when I saw a short weekend minicourse in a dance school about how to play latin percussion in salsa music, I went in. At the moment, someone I knew was asking me to play percussion in their oh-so-amateurish group, so I thought it could be a quick way to regain some practice and have a go at playing with them. The percussion course ended up being not too interesting. Like the group anyway. But, that same day I found that a Salsa (on1/linear) crash course was about to start, just after the percussion course. I was already there in the school, with no other plans for the weekend, and the Salsa course would be in fact almost gratis for me. So... why not?  That night there was also the periodic saturday latin party in the dance school (Salsa Libre), which started with a dan...

I remembered something like "the eyes still looked like asking if, whatever it was the universe was doing to him, would it please stop doing it". Douglas Adams, but ... where, what exactly? Some googling shows that the correct fragment was from "So long, and thanks for all the fish": "Only the eyes still said that whatever it was the Universe thought it was doing to him, he would still like it please to stop."  I can't remember why I thought the best book was "Hitch Hiker´s Guide to the Galaxy"; simply thumbing through SLATFATF has made me want to read it again. Perhaps it was the most... humane of the lot. The love story was so touching. The descriptions of the fish bowl, of how Arthur sensed the strangeness of the new Earth. And Fenchurch's disappearance was so… suddenly cruel.  I love so much Adams' style. Just recenty finished (finally!) "Thief of time" by Pratchett, and tried to stop comparing him to Adams and let ...