It's been tooooo long...

I haven't made a blog post in months. I need to be better with this! Lots of things have happened this past summer- a few haflas, some great workshops, summer dance classes have come and gone, and now I'm getting ready for my first competition.

A student of mine recently let me borrow her copy of Snake Hips. It's a great book by a lady who found belly dance after the breakup between her and her boyfriend. It gave her something to focus on and became a huge part of her life (trust me, I know the feeling!). She also wrote about a few personalities you'll find in different people you take classes and perform with. I almost felt like I knew a real-life person for each of her characters. It was such a great read that I couldn't put it down. I read it in one day. If I wasn't a belly dancer before I read the book, I certainly would have been looking for lessons by the time I was done!

A week before I read Snake Hips, I read They Told Me I Couldn't by Tamalyn Dallal. This book was about her travels to Columbia where she was a dancer in a few restaurants. What a brave lady who would up and leave the country without anything, to find adventure financed by her dance income there! I think that was one of the appeals of the book to me. I love Tamalyn's adventurous spirit. I wonder if she's a Sagittarius? This book was similar in format to how she wrote 40 Days and 1,001 Nights. That books documented her travels to five different Muslim countries while she lived in each for 40 days. I liked reading her observations in both books.

I just ordered The Belly Dancer which is a belly dance novel. Obviously, the author is a dancer herself and has done an amazing amount of research regarding the history of the dance in this country. I've read a small except from it. Lately, I just can't read enough books about belly dance. The more years I study this dance, I realize there's more yet that I have to learn. It's still just as exciting to me as when I first found it.