Friday, May 2, 2008

Kiev, Ukraine – Day Two

We skipped breakfast and decided to sleep in because we were beat. Our dance day started with the Advance-plus class and it took us about 45 minutes to break them. What I mean is that it took that amount of time to help them realize that they weren’t really leading, following, and/or balancing on their own. It was an awesome moment when the students realized what it took to actually move a follow and what it took to stay balanced. Fabulous!
By the end of class I was starving so we rushed up to lunch. We had chicken of some sort over rice and some beet salad (as in, just beets). We left lunch early so we could work on our routine a bit more and then hustled back for our advance class. But it was in vain because the teacher before us went over about 17 minutes (but who’s counting anyways?). I was not very pleased because that ate into our time with the advance dancers. Grrrrrrrrrr. Perhaps what perturbed me the most was the fact that the instructor didn’t acknowledge that Kevin and I were there for about 15 minutes, waiting. He didn’t look at us, say hi, say he was almost done…nothing. Not cool.
We ran the advance class 15 minutes into the next time slot and then did the same for the intermediate level too. I was really antsy until we started our final class because I don’t like running classes that late. I feel bad about making people wait that long because it’s rude. Now, that said, I myself and not a terribly punctual person, but 15 minutes without a heads up is inconsiderate. I am done sitting on my high horse. :-D
We ate dinner and headed back to the room for a quick nap. At 8pm we taught our Slides Taster and it was the most work I’ve ever done in a class. We taught the Slip Slop Shim Sham which means Kevin danced it and I put words/mnemonics to it so people could do it. At the beginning we had a bunch of students, but as the class progressed, we started losing people. We still had a fair number at then end (started at 75, ended at 50) and they were all drenched! It was awesome. Hopefully a video of it will be posted and then I’ll link it.
After class we came back to our darling little room, I showered and did laundry while Kev watched a movie, and then it was nap time. We needed to judge J&J prelims and finals which were going to start around 1am again.
At 12:30am people came to knock on our door to wake us up. We were already awake, but it was helpful. Many of the campers were dressed as witches, fairies, goblins, or other such fanciful characters while Kevo and I were in all black. We were also told that we missed out on all of the shows that were put on. Sigh – you can’t win them all.

The J&J was fun to watch and all the judges’ scores were very similar. A jam soon after broke out and Kevin did some handstand stuff….the pictures are sure to be great. I found some butter in the kitchen to put on some bread which made me a happy camper. And now we are off to bed.

Goodnight.

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