We Did What???? (Egypt)

As I promised in my last post, we are trying something new. A new adventure to add to our list of cultural studies. 

I suppose it was inevitable that at some point we would be faced with the decision of whether to learn to belly dance or not. We knew that in Egypt it is only women that belly dance, but in our house we don't discriminate by gender, so we decided that if anyone was going to learn to belly dance, then we all were. So, somehow, it was decided... we were all going to learn to belly dance. 

After some online research, I found an instructor who agreed to give us a private lesson for a very reasonable price. We were scheduled to go yesterday, but then our instructor called and she was sick. After the initial panic wore off, Preston and I talked about what we might do and decided to use our usually trust worthy friend, the internet. We found a website that teaches how to belly dance in eleven steps! ELEVEN!!! How bad could that be??? It also had a nice little demo video at the end. We committed. We were now going to teach ourselves how to belly dance. (See the steps here.)

So here it is, we played some Egyptian music and started practicing our moves.

Ultimately, the kids were on the floor laughing hysterically. 

I kind of felt like I should be making one of those new memes that are going around. You know, the ones that say, "What I think I look like" and "What I actually look like." The first picture would be of Shakira and the second one would be... well.... what we actually looked like, ridiculously off beat and not even a little bit fluid. 

I think that trying to teach ourselves how to belly dance was a fantastic endeavor, and probably a lesson from a professional would have turned out better results, but at least we can say that we have tried it. We also learned that our stomach muscles, our leg muscles and our arm muscles get sore really fast and those belly dancers absolutely have something on us. At the end, I can't say that I looked like Shakira, but I did look like this, so I'm good with that.