Behind the Scenes – SPOILER ALERT!!!

👉 The venue of the Marathon is in Lisbon, Portugal, and it’s called Voz do Operario. You can see it here. The Tuga Tango Marathon is organized there.

👉 The milongas in Athens are real ones (El Cabeceo & The Street Milonga). And so are the garbage bins, the restaurant where Alexis and Sarah ate, and the streets they walked. Lykavitos is also a real location. I’ll prepare a Google Maps video, for you, showing you the street Sarah walked to get to the first milonga and upload it here. But don’t be lazy. Schedule a trip, go to Greece, walk where Sarah walked and eat the baked feta cheese with honey and sesame seeds. Finally, the apartment they booked was in Plaka.

👉 Don´t forget to check the performances videos. You´ll see a performance in El Cabeceo, you´ll hear the songs that were mentioned in the book, and more!

👉 Over 2000 real tango dancers responded to the question ‘How do you measure tango?’ in over 200 facebook posts. The answer ‘In heartbeats’ was one of the most mentioned ones. If you want to read other answers -or write yours- you can do it here or here. Other questions that people were asked, and that you can still answer if you want were:

• What do you remember from your first tango classes? (Post 1, Post 2)
• Imagine you never danced tango before and you never had music classes. You listen to Emancipacion (Sarah danced it in one of the private classes with Diego) for the first time. How would you describe it? Post 1
• What do you remember from your first milonga? Post 1 
• Do you remember what you thought/felt the first time your tango teacher asked you to embrace a person you didn’t know? Post 1

👉 I wrote a big part of the book seated in a poolhouse, watching sheep, chickens, dogs and cats walking a few meters away from me. You can actually visit this location if you decide to join me here.

👉 While writing the book I was also attending some classes on how to write stories for children. If you have a child between the ages of 6 and 10, you can read The boy who loved water here (estimated reading duration 8 minutes).

👉 The first milonga of Sarah was one that was organized in Greece in 2012. It was indeed on the 7th floor of a building, and there was a fish market at ground level and everything else that was described in the book. That milonga no longer exists. Also, that was my first milonga too.

This page is dedicated to Paul Redmond. I created it after reading his facebook comment:

I won’t lie! It’s a good book.
I was hoping to read, at the end, that it was a true story and that I might find Sarah waiting to catch my cabecero at a milonga near me.
Then I realized there is a Sarah at every Malonga. Chances are 1 in 100 that I’ll find her. 🙂