Max-Emanuel Brauerei, Munich

When and where
Argentine Tango every Tuesday at the Max-Emanuel Brauerei, Adalbertstraße 33, 80799 München

Layout and atmosphere
A very pleasant room with sofas on a raised platform at one end, tables at the other, a good sized dance floor in the middle, and a bar along the side. Warm, soft lighting, not dark. There was competition on the night, so there was hardly anyone there when we turned up at about 10pm. More turned up gradually, mainly men. There were about six couples on the dance floor at the peak. [Edit: I'd estimate room for 10 or 12]. The DJ is apparently well known in Munich's Argentinian community, which is why I was there, because I'd found the place by asking an Argentinian colleague who lives there to find out where we could go for a dance after our meeting and dinner.

Hospitality
Good - a nice bar with reasonably-priced drinks, and I think my friend got a glass or two of free tap water from the bar. She certainly got a glass of prosecco and a very nice German dessert. Pleasant lady on the desk. Dodgy loos, though.

What I thought of the DJing
Started very traditional with lots of things I liked, then did some salsa which people danced a mixture of dances to once they realised it wasn't a cortina (that made for quite interesting navigation), a milonga set or two, then something really, really wierd but very beautiful from Iceland, then back to traditional valses, and more fairly normal stuff until it started to go neuvo and then a bit bonkers (candombe?) after 11pm. I enjoyed it. I was told that the DJ was an actual musician and there was nothing in his DJing to contradict that. He is called Mundo.

Getting there and getting home
Take the U3 or U6 to Universität. Turn left out of the station so you are facing the hard-to-miss Siegstor ("Victory Gate"). Turn left again and walk two blocks to the Max-Emanuel Brauerei. It is all in blocks, like they do in America, so you can't easily get lost. Walk to the back and up the stairs past the loos. The U-Bahn runs till 2am so you can probably reverse the process to get home, but taxis are also cheap, the city's not that big, and you can get one at the Siegstor, as I did.

Getting in
€6.00 to get in, much cheaper than the cheapest of London.

The website
The one I found belongs to the venue and tells you where it is, when, and how much it is to get in. Does the job.

How it went
I was exceptionally lucky in my first dance, and also in the unexpected absence of much competition. So I hardly sat down all evening. My colleague (who doesn't dance - yet - but is a fine gossiper) found out that this was unusual and apparently new girls tend to spend a lot of time "ironing their skirts" by sitting down. I got lots of good dances and no bad ones, two were very good and one of those I thought was exceptionally musical. I had a very nice time, and even if you didn't dance much it would still be a nice place to be. My colleague - who, as I said, doesn't dance, because it's something her grandmother used to do - got the bug from watching me in the wierd Icelandic thing and started saying she had to learn this. We discussed what to look for in a teacher, and she immediately got her first lesson from a friendly chap who had just danced with me and happens to work for the same company as us and could recommend one. All in all, a very successful evening.

And now it's time to retrieve my colleagues from behind their giant beer glasses and get on a plane home.

xHedgehog@München