Salsa Café & Dancing Salsipuedes

May 1998
Ok we're finally DONE!! We've put in a lot of hours painting, scrubbing and of course DANCING!!!! We're having a blast here, it's our little paradise!!!

A LITTLE HISTORY-

A long time dream of Stephen Walroud came true after he and his dance partner, Undine, won the dance competition in 1996. Due to the enormous publicity around the competition a start was made for a Salsa craze on the island. Salsipuedes started in September 1996.
The location was in small room in Hotel Holland, it started with only a few classes in the evening hours. But after every season, which is ten weeks, more and more people wanted to learn Salsa or just wanted add spice to their salsa. Very soon teaching went from just a few hours in the week to every day 2 classes of each 1.5 hour, except on Sundays.
Classes were filled and everybody had fun dancing with each other but we wanted more!!
Although salsa was getting more and more popular, merengue was still the main thing in club’s and on parties. People were eager to practice more, to show off what they had learned and to share with other salseros. Salsa Splash was born!! After every season Salsipuedes had a BIG 100% Salsa party for all local Salsa freaks.

Still this wouldn’t satisfy the Salsa hunger for long. It was again time to move on and invest in what Stephen believed in.

In 1997 we started looking for a new affordable location. This was not an easy task. Too small, too big, too expensive, too far. Then we found something but they didn’t wanted us to use the water tabs cause they were afraid that we would forget to turn them off????
They had a bad experience with the previous people who rented the space. But this was for us of course a NO GO!! How can we have a dance school if there is NO water, especially here in the tropics!! We would die instantly heat of dehydration after 10 minutes of dancing, we drink liters of water just to keep our body fluid level in balance.

THEN we found a very nice building in the center of town, not too big or too small, location perfect, prize reasonable. It only needed some adjustments to make it perfect as "Salsa Café and Dancing Salsipuedes" It used to be an office with a lot of little rooms in it. Remodeling started and..................well let me not get into to the remodeling fase of it. YIKES what a hassle!!! The sunny side of it is that may we be ever without a job, we now have enough experience to be a painter, carpenter, electrician and uhh what am I forgetting......... ah an alarm specialist, especially Stephen is now an expert :-)

In May 1998 we had our first class at the new location, still a lot of work had to be done but the stereo and mirrors were in place, that was all we needed. During the next few months we worked on perfecting it, decorating it and other little things that still had to be done.

On August 9th, right after the Curaçao Salsa Festival, we had our grand opening. WOW it was a BIG success!! Lots a people came, the caterers were there, "Arnell y su Orquesta" was playing in full SALSA swing and of course we were all dancing the night away!! But first we had the official part of the opening with speeches and cutting the ribbon on the clave.
Our minister of finance, Mr. Ys, had the honors of cutting the ribbon and our local radio salsa DJ Mr. Pinedo had the honors of playing the clave sticks, we and the rest of all the invited people followed Mr. Pinedo in the clave. It was really something special!!

If you’re ever on Curaçao please visit us at
Salsa & Dancing Salsipuedes

(Salsa on Curaçao) (Night Life) (Salsa Splash) (Miles Peña at Salsipuedes) (Salsipuedes) (Curaçao meets Salsa Brava)
(Chatboard Party '97) (Salsa Congresso '98)