Can you dance?

Before you answer yes to that question, you should go to Enklawa during a Salsa Party. Who will be there except you? La creme de la creme of Polish salsa dancers. For only 5 zlots (1,2 euros) if you’re a girl and 10 zlots if you’re a man, you can see tens of couples dancing as if the National Championship of Salsa is taking place right then and there. And you can also see that dancing doesn’t mean “salsa-ing”, exactly how boiling an egg does not mean cooking!
Warsaw In Your Pocket discribes this club like this:

A young, elite crowd trots down the red carpet leading to the entrance, then proceed to drink within an inch of Hades inside a horrible interior of stone cladding and suspended steel tubing. Good time music – disco, salsa, chart hits – keep the atmosphere bubbling and Enklawa has become the foggy finish point to many ul. Mazowiecka pub crawls.

… but it fails to capture the real athmosphere, which is… a night in Ibiza!

People don’t speak, but dance!

The moment I took off my jacket and stood in line to leave it at the entrance, a man offered me a drink and asked me to dance. And that is characteristic to Enklawa. Everybody asks everybody to dance. Many can’t speak Polish, so the invitation is made in few words, like: “Dance?”

After 23:00 the club the ring is full and only the bad dancers watch the party standing aside with a drink in their hands. A tall 25 year old man, dressed in a suit and carrying around a glass of beer to avoid dancing, stands at the bar, next to the ring, and smiles to pretty girls – almost to all girls in all actuality, as the light is red and everybody looks fascinating in that light. If he’s lucky, a girl will teach him how to salsa or at least he will meet someone to share his loneliness at the bar.

If most men wear suits, girls have put on their short dresses and high healed shoes. The long cleaveages and colorful skimpy outfits work perfectly with the hot athmosphere and it gives you even more the impression you have travelled in time and space entering the club.

A girl wearing a tight, short, black dress spins nonstop, sometimes stepping on somebody’s toes, but she doesn’t seem to care. Survival of the fittest in Enklawa! Niether the unconfortable shoes or a bad dance partner will stop her form dancing all night long. And that is also why 40-year-old foreigners stop in Enklawa! The word must have gone around that beautiful young girls dance to latino rythms and they come either to watch or to try to make friends, close friends. Preferably, of the opposite sex!

Luckily for the ones watching the show and enjoying a drink, the prices aren’t high! A normal beer is 8 zlots (2 euros) and a beer with raspberry syrop is 9 zlots. Cocktails go up tp 17 zlots.

The Ibiza-like feeling doesn’t go away at midnight. At 3 am people are still exchanging partners and dancing like Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing. But Enklawa is not the place to learn how to dance. Telling a person you can’t dance will leave you alone with your drink, don’t expect someone to offer to teach you. The ring is too crowded and the music is changing so fast that you have to come prepared after a long reharsal in front of the mirror at home.

Salsa nights in Enklawa are famous among clubbers. But so are the other parties: pop, house, funk. The managers care about their loyal customers and email them details about the parties and sometimes even passwords which get them in with a cheaper ticket!

Shhhh, I’ll tell you a secret: the next party’s secret word is “sun“! Have fun! 😉