We Aren’t All Dancers

Every Monday and Thursday we participate in a language exchange with the EARTH University students. This bi-weekly dinner allows the EARTH students to practice their English and allows us Northeastern students to practice our Spanish. During these exchanges our conversations often involve basic topics such as “What’s your favorite food?”, “Where are you from?”, “How many siblings do you have?” etc.

These bland topics are exhausted rather quickly. As a result the conversation often leads to long pauses and awkward laughs. In order to address this “awkwardness” my first reaction is to respond with some type of joke. However, if you know me my jokes are rarely funny. The majority of my jokes really only get laughs from myself and bystanders who just feel bad for me. Therefore I knew I was really taking a chance trying to insert one of my jokes in a different language risking making the conversation even more awkward.

I took the risk and started the joke – “Quieres bailar” which translates to “Do you like to dance?” Immediately my audience began to light up, “Si! Si! Siempre!” I was feeling pretty confident…I went on in Spanish “Me too! But my dance moves are very bad”. Of course they all chuckled and shook they’re heads “No you’re not I am sure you’re great!” I felt the pressure to be honest and truthful so I began to show them my dance moves desperately trying to demonstrate how bad my dance moves were as well as most Americans compared to the beautiful Latin America Salsa and Tango. The moment I broke out my dance moves all the students began to laugh uncontrollably. I quickly realized that these laughs were not a result of me making a funny joke – for goodness sake I hadn’t even gotten to the punch line! Rather their tears of laughter were originating from my horrendously embarrassing “Mom Moves” as many people call them. Hands in the air, awkward swaying of hips and the slight tilt of my head. I was hopeless and all the Latin American students saw it too.

I chuckled with them and sat back down in my chair as I waited for the laughs to subside. Just when I thought the laughs were completely finished a man exclaimed across the table “You know there’s dance lessons every Thursday in the auditorium right? You should definitely come with!” Everyone began to chuckle again and pleaded that I join them for dance club the next Thursday. I laughed with them all and agreed I did indeed need desperate help with my dance moves.

After this laughable experience my calendar is now booked for next Thursday at 7:30pm. Wish me luck! Hopefully things go much smoother than my attempted joke at my Thursday evening language exchange.