Well, how exciting! On the way home from our penultimate Spanish class we took a route that we hadn't done before. The town's roads are on a grid system so there is a never-ending variety of left and right turns we can take in our diagonal route across town.

Anyhow, we went down Corrientes, a road with lots of theatres on it, outside one of which were loads of people wearing t-shirts that said 7/8 on the front. As we wondered what it meant, we realised that on the back they said Carlinhos Brown Workshop. In the 90s Carlinhos Brown was the musical director of Timbalada, a huge line up of drummers (over 100!) with singers and other musicians that had a monstrous string of hits in south america. Since then he has 'gone solo' and become even more popular in spanish speaking parts of the world.

Unfortunately we had missed the workshop, but while we pondered it all we realised there was a big poster advertising a Carlinhos Brown gig at 21.30hrs and we managed to get tickets! The tickets warned us 'Importante: el espectaculo comienza punctualment' ('Important: the show starts punctually‘). We were shown to our seats and the people next to us immediately struck up conversation with us, which we managed in a very halting manner! All around us people were greeting each other, hugging, kissing cheeks and having a very happy time. For a while no-one seemed concerned that 21.30hrs had come and gone and anyhow, people were still arriving, being seated and greeting each other. By about 21.50hrs the chanting and clapping had started and eventually, about half an hour late, the spectacle began to great cheers and applause.

Carlinhos appeared bare-chested in a white suit with ruffled cuffs and cowboy hat, with his 10-strong band of percussionists and brass players accompanying him. We’re still not sure why the kit drummer sat under an arch formed from two huge fish balanced on their tails, but we think every drummer should have such a place on the stage!

During the performance the bateria from the workshop (50 people mostly playing drums of various sizes and types) appeared on stage and performed with him and, even through this was not the most professional part of the gig, it was in many ways the most exciting for us as it was the sort of music we used to play with Butta Batu, our Samba band in Newark. How we would love to drum again having heard it! The atmosphere through the whole evening was fabulous. The theatre probably held 2 or 3 thousand people and throughout the whole show everyone was standing up, dancing, clapping the rhythms and sometimes even singing en-mass (apart from us because we didn’t know the words!)

On the way out we picked up a flyer to say that Olodum (the big samba reggae bateria from Bahia de Salvador, Brasil, that played on Paul Simon's Rhythym of the Saints album) will be in BsAs later in the month. It may fit in with our schedule - it would be good to see them!

The next day was our last Spanish lesson. Our language has definitely improved but we still have a lot to learn and an awful long way to go before we can have anything like a conversation outside of the class! However, we’re going to spend the next couple of weeks exploring bits of Buenos Aires that we’ve not had time to do so far and put our Spanish into use a bit more in everyday situations. Then maybe at a later stage we’ll take some more lessons We got a certificate, but this only proves that we attended classes not that we can speak Spanish!