I felt this most strongly on Valentines Day. My friends had a party – on the surface this was quite cool, there was party food, a bar, and dancing. But it was (as ever here) quite a surreal experience. Rather than buffet style food that one could pick at as they got slowly inebriated there was proper sit down food (well I guess it would be hard to stand & eat rice with your fingers off a paper plate!). Oh & we couldn’t eat it until the priest (yes the priest came too) had led us all in prayer. The bar, looked the part with an array of spirits & liquors, but it turned out that these were actually just old bottles filled with coke or lemonade!
The strangest thing though was the dancing. It was true school disco (& I don’t mean the Camden club). Everyone sat round the edge of the room, boys on one-side, girls on the other. The boys (men?) would then approach a girl (woman?) and ask her to dance. For upbeat songs, the dancing was conducted in two rather neat rows (boys on one side, girls on the other) with a good foot between them. For slower songs or ones that could be walced to there was more formal (Come Dancing) style moves. Every now & then there was a traditional Manggarai dance, which is kinda like line dancing (or perhaps the English version would be the birdy song!).
But perhaps the main difference between this and the teenage parties I remember is the lack of embarrassment on behalf of the guys – all felt confident asking a partner to dance – there was no social misfit maliciously left out. Also the dancing was very restrained & non-sexual. Oh, & of course there was no snogging at the end of the night!
What this really makes apparent is the third age that we now have in England – the ‘twenty-something-agers’. Rather than moving straight from a teenage mentality to the adult responsibilities of getting married and having a family (as perhaps my parents or my grandparents generation did) I have time to be an adult & enjoy it. Time where I have a disposable income and disposable commitments. A time when financially I can afford to have fun and society permits me to have it. Things here are entertaining, but perhaps if the twenty-something-agers had the freedom I have in England, they would be just that little bit more fun!
the 'bar'
traditional dancing
partner dancing
3 comments:
there's a competition to 'finish' the picture of you dancing, with the challenge being to add the below-the-waist missing bit - I have a feeling gt will win it! The observational, reflective and entertaining blogging is going from strength to strength mate!
dt
Hey, just how old do you think we are? Surely you haven't been away that long! During our informative years women fought for, and acquired equal rights/pay which changed our dependance on men as 'breadwinners' totally, enabling us to lead fuller and individual lives. This in itself changed the concepts of marriage to a more 'equal' partnership and a decisive mature attitude to having children. (Well, perhaps sadly not in all cases!)
You can now view me doing the traditional dance in full glorious technicolour (legs n' all!) at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYXxuiEX8BW
BTW, I'm going away for a week to a health conference in Ende (Flores) so prob won't be posting for a while... chat amongst yourselves!
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