Date Night

Last summer while on home leave, our kids took the Red Cross babysitter certifying course. Upon arriving in Germany, we realized, if our kids are old enough to leave alone as the responsible parties for small children, they were probably old enough for us to leave alone at home for an evening.  Therefore, when we fail to go out on a date, it is absolutely our fault.  We don't even need to plan ahead.  Imagine that.  It is a new Era for us.  We haven't gone out much yet, but we have started to explore our new freedom.  In fact, we have decided that Berlin is a great city for warding off any impending mid-life crises by going out and playing.

Last night we went out for dinner & dancing.  We decided to go to Schoneberg because we found a club with salsa dancing there on the internet: Havanna Berlin. So, leaving the kids to their own devices (they were happily cheering: "streaming netflix! popcorn! Wii! late bedtime!" when we left), we went to find a yummy restaurant near the club of our choice.  Of course, after ten blocks of amazing restaurants, we settled on a Tapas place. This is a LONG way from Lusaka. There were more restaurants in two blocks than in all of the capitol of Zambia.  After a delicious dinner, we wandered some more.  Doug didn't really want to make it to the club in time for the salsa lesson, thinking it would be too hard to follow in German, and eventually we found our way in to our new favorite dance club.  It was Fabulous.  We were really nervous that it would be full of drunken, hot twenty-somethings and we would feel old and out-of-place.  To our delight, it was a completely mixed age place, where people seemed to have only one thing in common: love of dancing.  There didn't even seem to be any heavy drinking.  The first dance floor, the reggaeton area, was finishing up a salsa lesson.  Deciding to explore, we wandered past a disco dance floor until we found the most amazing salsa dance club area downstairs.  People of all ages and walks of life dancing together.  I felt like I had fallen into a film, an imaginary world.  We don't have the skill (yet) do that sort of dancing, but we loved watching and are inspired to learn.  We ended up dancing with a bit younger crowd on the reggaeton dance floor.  All in all, we were fully rewarded for our adventurousness and hope to return and dance again.