Chapter Twenty-Four: Feet Found (~jinghan)
I was really quite nervous as the elevator made it’s way to level four. I was going to a dancing class run by the MUDC*. (It took me a while to work out what the acronym stood for and which of the 15 clubs I had signed up it was that was bombarding my inbox. You can’t even say it without sounding like you are trying and failing to learn some foreign language.)
I had gone to one of these dance classes with one of my friends last semester. It had been an intermediate Latin class in the latter part of the semester, and frankly, it had been a disaster. Everyone knew what they were doing, the teacher had ignored me existence and kept mentioning some scary sounding exam and it had cost more than I had been willing to part with. And that was how my ego and courage had been crush and I decided to ignore all emails from MUDC in future.
I hadn’t accounted for the fact that in a moment of boredom I would decide to click the link in the email (in my defence, I didn’t read the email itself) and browse around the MUDC site, which is when I discovered that classes were free in the first two weeks of term and that there was street Latin on at a time that I happened to have a two hour break. (I had been telling everyone that I would love to learn Salsa without actually intending to go out of my way to find somewhere to learn Salsa.) And so by a freak coincidence I pencilled the class into my diary.
And so that was how I found myself outside the door to room 404 in the Arts Centre listening to muffled operatic music through the door and glancing around nervously, not sure whether I was in the right place. I hadn’t been organised enough to rope one of my friends into doing this with me.
“Are you here for the dancing thing?” The girl I presumed had been waiting for a class in one of the adjacent rooms asks me.
“Uh yeah… Is this the right place?”
“I hope so. Don’t go in that room though. They’re doing something else at the moment.”
“I suppose you learnt the hard way then!”
I found out that she was on exchange from Edinburgh, and this was only her second week in Melbourne. (So brave! And here I was scared shitless about a dancing class even though I learnt ballet for 10 years of my life.) We talk to some of the other loitering souls in the hallway and discover that they are just as alone, more inexperienced, and just as first-year-bly as me. Which makes us more or less spur-of-the-moment friends. And already its not seeming all that bad.
I had thought that I wouldn’t have to go to any more not-knowing-anyone things after exhausting all my friend-making energy in the first semester, but the dancing class was brilliant. I loved the style of dancing, it was so naturally to just get to know everyone (well, at least the guys that we had to rotate through) and I hadn’t spent a cent! (I know, I’m stingy.)
I’m 100% intending to go back next week, whether anyone I know joins me or not. And intending to pay the $50 to continue for the rest of the semester. (It’s not expensive if you know that you’ll enjoy it.) I have joined countless clubs, dabbled in a couple, but it took me until now to find one that I can make an honest commitment to and one where I can just get along with people purely out of a common interest. And thinking about it, I could not be happier if I had stumbled upon this in first semester. (After all I needed first semester to find my feet, and there’s no point dancing if your feet are lost.)