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| Please note our matching facial expressions. |
There were murmurs, murmurs between my host father and the woman organizing karaoke. Something about “El Primer Millón,” the song I jokingly said I would sing. I didn't pay much attention to it through, our family was going crazy with the karaoke, almost monopolizing the microphone as all of our cousins, parents, brothers, and sisters took their turn. Suddenly, however, the microphone was passed to me as I was introduced as singing “El Primer Millón” to the surrounding observers at the club we were at. As I pulled Mariela towards me to help me out, the song begun and we fought our way through the rest of the song, trying to push the microphone towards each other instead of ourselves, laughing into the microphone as we saw the ridiculousness of the situation. It was like the blind leading the blind, I'm not perfectly fluent with Spanish, and this was a relatively fast song, and Mariela didn't know how the song went. Somehow, it worked out though.
At the beginning of our stay in Heredia, our family had played with the idea of taking Julia and me out dancing with the family. As our stay began to draw to a close, I brought it up again with my family. We hadn't been able to go before because we were always gone for the weekends, but having this past Friday free, we decided it was the perfect opportunity to go. So we gathered together our family for the night and asked Olivia for permission, who, knowing she really shouldn't, told us we could go as long as we got back by eleven (which of course we wouldn't) and as long as she could come along as well to supervise (and dance).
We drove far into the mountains to reach our destination, and when we finally got to the club, we could see the city of Heredia and San José glittering behind us. Somewhere on a mountain in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, we found ourselves at our final stop. Magali and Jamie joined our family for the fun, as well as Grace and her roommate: girls I'm not really familiar with.
Before long, karaoke ended and various Latin music began to play. Everything from salsa to meringue was played and danced to. For the most part, everyone would split into partners and then rotate every once in a while. We mostly rotated with our family and friends, dancing with cousins and with each other, but at some point, when we had all tired out some, we started to dance in a circle, and people outside of our group began to invite us to dance or just join our circle. The most interesting about the club was the style. Salsa doesn't stop when the class ends here. Here, everyone was doing salsas or meringues or rumbas with their own personal flair. At some point, the typical American club music began to play, but still, the dancing leaned towards being more traditional, which is probably one of the coolest discoveries I've made about Latin America so far.
In an all too short amount of time, however, some members of our group were tiring, and we decided to call it a night. We piled into our parents' van as our cousins poured into their parents' vans. This time, we drove Magali and Jamie home, so they sat in the middle row of the three rows of seats with Julia, and I was given the spot in between my brother and sister, Eric and Mariela. We spent the whole ride joking around and singing and dancing along badly with the music, still on a natural high from the fun we had. Arriving home at one in the morning, we packed up our things in preparation for our 4:30am alarm the next morning to leave for our excursion.
