One of the many things I’ve been eagerly anticipating about being in Argentina is the chance to train Capoeira with other groups – possibly even in Brazil, should the opportunity for a side trip arise. Before I even left Toronto, I was searching for and bookmarking the sites of a number of different Capoeira groups in Buenos Aires.

There’s a fairly large number of groups and locations here. So much so that I’ve made a secondary project of cataloguing these classes on a Google map, and their schedules in some kind of mental map, so that I can assess, on any given day, my chances of being able to make it to a class.

Well, if getting lost on the streets of a new city is a traditional rite of passage for every traveller, then the 21st century’s contribution to it is to get lost online.

Capoeira groups online, it turns out, can be as tricky, resourceful, and elusive as real-life capoeiristas. We exist as Facebook groups, Blogger and WordPress blogs, decked-out Flash sites, dated Flash sites, decked-out and/or dated HTML sites, and everything in between. Class times may or may not be posted, and may or may not be accurate. This is not to complain about capoeiristas – most groups are run by volunteers, and I’m helping with our group’s website and am all too aware of our own responsibilities and shortcomings. Besides, one of my greatest enablers in all this has also been one of the most frustrating factors: Google maps simply does not have the same tolerance for addresses that don’t precisely match the names in its database, and porteños abbreviate their lengthy street names in myriad ways. Triangulating (or whatever its higher-dimensional analogue is when you throw time in with the two spatial dimensions) the class times has required traversing more electronic dead-ends than I wish to recall.

So it was that my first attempt to reach a class was unsuccessful. Though by the time I left the house for class, I was prepared for the possibility. The night before, in preparation to meet this group, I decided to pop the instructor’s name into everbody’s favourite search engine. Up turned a site for his capoeira group that looked significantly more up-to-date than the one I had previously encountered, and it contained no mention of the class time I had seen on that site. But the original schedule had a class not far from the house, so I figured I may as well wander over and see for myself whether class was on.

When I turned up, not only was there no class, but half the building was missing, too. So much for that.

The only surefire way to get reliable class time and location info? To ask, of course. So tonight I’m killing time in Las Cañitas, on the very reliable information (from the instructor himself, by email) that a class will commence in half an hour. Quiet, capoeira belly butterflies. Your time will come.