I needed to buy a couple of the tiny safety pins today, and I went into a local shop that sells such things. The woman brought out six pinned together and asked me how many I needed. I told her I needed two.

“Oh well you can buy just two,” she said, starting to unfasten them.

I figured I could always use pins, so I said I’d take them all. Then I saw some bigger ones and thought I might as well take a couple of them as well.

She put the whole lot in a wee plastic bag and gave them to me with a smile. Old fashioned service indeed!

Some time ago, my friend Cecilia bought a white bench for her garden, and she asked me if I would paint a vine on it. For various reasons I couldn’t get out there to do it before, but today was the day. Here it is. She is delighted with it, and I think it will look very nice in the garden.

A couple of months ago, Cecilia told me her son, Joaquin, had ordered tickets for her and me to see Dracula, the musical. I wasn’t completely sure it was my cup of tea, but looked forward to it anyway.

I have no knowledge of Dracula at all, never having read the book or seen any of the movies. In fact, knowing it would all be in Spanish, I Googled “What is the story of Dracula?” to get a summary so that I would have some idea what was going on.

I had no idea what to expect — and I certainly didn’t expect this! It was simply the best show I’ve ever seen, anywhere. I’ve seen the big shows, and I’ve seen them in London and New York as well as Glasgow and Toronto, and I’ve never seen anything to beat this.

It was not in a theatre, but a huge arena, and there was a great atmosphere from the beginning. What I didn’t know was that this is an Argentine production and in fact it’s a bit of an Argentine institution. Cecilia has seen it several times, most recently twenty years ago, and clearly lots of the people there had also seen it before. There were people of all ages there.

Everything about this show was first class. There was a big chorus, and they were busy — lots of singing and dancing and dashing about, and the music was lovely. The staging was fantastic, with lots of lighting effects, especially in Dracula’s castle. The costumes were gorgeous, especially the wedding scene in the first act. And Dracula’s cloak was like another character! The singing and acting of the seven or eight main characters were wonderful, and their diction was so clear I had no trouble following what was going on and relating it to the story I had read on Google.

But the star of the show was, of course, Dracula himself. The part was played by a popular Argentine actor called Juan Rodó, and he was magnificent—wonderful voice, magnetic stage presence, and he could certainly work that cloak!

We couldn’t take photos, of course, and I’m sure they wouldn’t have done it justice anyway, but at the end of the intermission, as the second act overture began, this happened:

Here are a couple of shots of us, and comparative shots of the wonderful Juan Rodó and Count Dracula.

Towards the end, I was thinking about other shows I’ve seen over the years and asking myself if I’ve ever seen anything better than this. There wasn’t. Unforgettable!

I already posted photos of the early stages of this one, and last week I finished it. The teacher took it home to varnish it, and on Friday I brought it home. Here it is.

I’m reasonably happy with it, as it was my first attempt at Fileteado lettering, which is very complicated. But don’t look too closely!

So on Friday the teacher asked me what I wanted to do next, and I said a dragon. Dragons feature quite a lot in Fileteado Porteño and I like them. Some are just the heads and necks, but I wanted the full body, which makes it quite a challenge. As before, I will send you the stages as I complete them. Here’s the beginning. The teacher was quite pleased with my drawing and next week I have to do it all over again on tracing paper ready for the next step, which is transferring it to the board using chalk.

I have been wondering what colour to make it. What colour do you think dragons are? I’d love to have your suggestions in the comments!

A few weeks ago I went with Gillian, Lina, Cecilia and Venetia to see Piaff!, a live musical production based on the life of Edith Piaff. One of our other friends had seen it a few weeks before and raved about it, but when we tried to get tickets they were sold out. Fortunately, they extended the run and we were able to see it.

It was in a lovely old theatre called the Liceu, a historical venue on Plaza Congreso, which is surrounded by other lovely historical buildings, and just being there was a pleasure.

The characters are all kind of rough and ready street people, so there was a lot of slang and colloquial language, which meant, I have to admit, that I couldn’t follow a lot of it. Also, we all felt that it could have done with less talking and more singing. Having said that, it was a good show, and the woman who played Piaff, Elena Roger, was a tour de force! Like Piaff herself, she is about 5’0″ with a huge voice. She interpreted the songs in a way I’m sure Piaff would have loved, and her closing rendition of Non, Je ne Regrette Rien brought the house down. It stayed in my head for several days!

If you read this blog regularly you will have noticed I haven’t posted for a while, and several of you have kindly written to see if I am OK. Yes, I’m fine, and the truth is I’ve been a bit lazy about keeping the blog up to date. It’s not that I haven’t been doing anything, but there didn’t seem to be much that would actually interest anybody other than me!

Anyway, it’s Sunday night and that’s when I usually do my weekly update, so I decided to post about a couple of recent events and then do the weekly email. Hopefully I’ll get back on track now, and thanks for checking on me!

My friend Venetia has been in Europe for the past couple of months and just came home a few days ago. A bunch of us decided to welcome her back with dinner in our favourite parilla, La Gran Carniceria del Plata. Venetia said that although she had eaten a variety of great foods, she hadn’t had a steak since she left Buenos Aires, so this was worth the wait!

For various reasons, I’ve been away from the blog for a while, but I felt I had to post today in honour of The Queen.

What a woman! Seventy years plus the rest leading up to it in the service of others. Many often saw the life of the Royal Family as happening in some parallel universe, so far removed is it from the lives we lead, but it’s what she was born to. She saw her entire life through the lens of duty. It couldn’t have been easy, but she saw it through.

And she managed five months without her beloved Philip by her side — it must have been a very long five months. Someone posted this little cartoon, which made me smile.

She lived an entire lifetime doing her best, and how many of us can say that?

I say a hearty, “Thank you, Your Majesty!”

On Saturday Ale had to cancel my tango lesson because he had to go to the dentist, so I thought I would be without my tango “fix” for that day. But I had arranged to have dinner with Sally at Los Galgos, a Bar Notable only ten minutes from El Beso, one of my regular milongas, and I remembered there was an afternoon milonga there on Saturdays, so I went along.

I really enjoyed it. The afternoon milongas tend to be less formal, so I wore a toned down version of tango clothes — still wore the shoes of course! I danced with some very good dancers. Two of them looked like “little old men” you would pass on the street without noticing, but boy were they great dancers. One of them told me he had been dancing tango for fifty years! He complimented me on my dancing as we left the floor, and as we happened to be sitting at the same table, we chatted a bit. When I told him I lived here he said, “Yes, I know. If you didn’t live in Buenos Aires you couldn’t dance like that.” How cool is that?

So then I went over to Los Galgos and met Sally. We had a lovely dinner, lots of good chat and a bottle of good Argentine red. She ate the Spanish omelette, and I had a delicious mushroom dish – photos below.