The Music. Salsa music is complex. If you listen to it in a club or through your headphones, pick out just one instrument and listen to how it's woven together with the many other instruments that are playing. Each instrument seems to be playing its own song; but when they all play at the same time, one song happens.

If you speak Spanish, you'll hear songs about all of the usual topics: love, friendship, agony, history, politics, and even food. The great thing about salsa music is how these themes are brought to life by each group's sonero (or singer). The sonero is often responsible for being able to sing tonally and percussively while at the same time spontaneously creating verses like a free-style rapper!

The instrumentation, alone, is facinating. Many of the instruments used to compose salsa music are older than recorded history! Take the claves (translation: "the keys"), for example. They're the oldest percussion instrument--consisting of 2 sticks simply struck together. Prehistoric, and yet they're still played in almost every salsa group today.

The Dance. The word "mambo (a synonymn for salsa dancing) is an ancient Yoruban word that literally means "dancing with or for the Gods." Today's salsa dance has a lineage that can be traced all the way back to Africa. Rumba, an ancient dance from East Africa, was carried over to Cuba during the days of Caribbean slavery. Rumba is the the spirtual father of salsa music. When the dance arrived in Cuba, people danced it to perform complex rituals.

The rhythm and dance of today's salsa are very different than traditional rumba. After years of mixing cultures, salsa dancing is an amalgam of dances borrowed from Afro-Cuban dances and--believe it or not--many dances from the United States and Europe. (In fact, swing dancing and tap were two of the most inluencial dance forms in the evolution of salsa dancing.)

The People. Salsa is everywhere. It's big in some places that might surprise you, like Sweden, Germany, India, Russia, China, Japan, Africa, Singapore and more. If dance is a universal language, then salsa is one of the most spoken around the world. It's highly likely that you'll meet people from all over the globe when you go to a salsa club. Salsa clubs are magnets of multiculturalism.

Exercise. What would you rather do: run on a treadmill for an hour or have fun dancing for an hour? Have you ever enjoyed doing hard cardiovascular workouts for two hours straight or more? You will on the dancefloor.

You'll sweat. But you'll enjoy it. There are some male salsa dancers that are notorious for bringing one or two extra t-shirts to the club; they have to change into a new one every hour or less. Dont' be embarrassed. Everybody sweats at the salsa club. If you're not sweating then you're either just getting to the club or you've been hiding in the bathroom all night.

Salsa dancing is extremely good for you. It's one of the only exercise experiences where you're not thinking that you're exercising.

You'll Smile. A lot.