(Part 3 of a five-part series)

SOYIA ELLISON/Special (ENLARGE)

Teachers Guillermo Berzins and Celeste Oliva demonstrate a tango move during class.

Special (ENLARGE)

Soyia Ellison and new friends Robert Paech (seated next to her), Erin Scheffler and Timme de Bruin meet at Cafe Tortoni, among the most-storied cafes in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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Buenos Aires, Argentina — When the idea of giving up my Atlanta life for one in Buenos Aires was taking hold, a friend gave me Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love," in which Gilbert divorces her husband, breaks up with her lover, and spends a year in Italy, India and Indonesia. Before she leaves, she solicits the names of every friend of a friend of a friend in one of these countries.

Gilbert pursued making friends the way someone else might pursue finding a job, and I realized I'd have to do the same here.

So whenever someone in the States told me about a person they knew of in Buenos Aires, I made a note. I also joined the South American Explorers Club, an organization for expatriates with a clubhouse in Bs. As. Just before I left (and in a couple of cases, after I arrived), I sent introductory e-mails to the people whose names I'd collected. Some e-mailed back; some didn't.

This is how I met Brendan Haverty, a free-spirited Irishman who speaks perfect Spanish and loves wine, and Leo Szapiro, a neurotic Argentine who's forever laughing so hard that tears stream down his face.

Leo and I meet once a week or so to practice speaking English and Spanish. We keep little notebooks close by so that we can record the best words and phrases we learn. The other night he invited me to a party at his apartment, where my little universe of friends expanded to include JuanManuel Castillo, a dark-eyed model who was Cosmo magazine's man of the month in March 2006, and Oscar Biazzo and Luis Batica, a sweet gay couple who drove me back to the apartment when the party broke up around 3 a.m. (That's early for Buenos Aires; on the way home we passed long lines of people waiting to get into clubs.)

I met Damian LaPlace on my own, when he showed up one night while I was eating at the Dorothy Parker restaurant. He owns the place and is a piano player and composer to boot. He invited me to join him another night for a traditional Argentine stew called puchero, then to go to the Japanese Gardens, then to the theater, and so on.

What do all these people have in common? They're men. More about that later. But first, another man: Robert Paech, my tango partner.

Yes, tango.

Perfect partners

After I graduated from college, I started acting in community theater. I'm strictly an amateur. I have no illusions of a career onstage. But when I left Jacksonville, a friend and sometime director told me, "You know, Soyia, you're not the most graceful person. If you want to improve as an actor, you should think about taking a ballet class, just to help you with your movement."

So I did.

And once a week, for six weeks, I felt like Snuffleupagus from "Sesame Street." While my so-called "beginner" classmates pranced about on their tippy-toes, I galumphed. I remember thinking, "I can't believe I'm paying for this humiliation."

But I just couldn't see living in Buenos Aires and not trying to learn to tango. When I mentioned this to Robert, an Australian at my Spanish school, he said, "Well, if you want to take lessons, I'll go with you." This left me with no excuse not to give it a go.

The tango is Argentina's national dance and something of a national obsession. All around the city, you see the slicked-back hair and smiling face of the most popular entertainer the country has ever known — tango singer Carlos Gardel, who died in a plane crash in 1935.

Birthed in the brothels of Buenos Aires (or so the story goes), tango maintained a nasty reputation for decades. Not until Paris fell in love with the dance in the early 1900s did it become respectable at home. Since then, its popularity has waxed and waned. Today, plenty of young Argentines have no idea how the dance is done. But plenty more do.

Real tango looks very little like what most Americans think of when they think of tango. Dancers don't extend their arms all the way to one side or carry a rose in their teeth. It's a little less dramatic than you might imagine, but just as sexy. Except when I do it. Maybe I'm not Snuffleupagus, but I might be the female equivalent of Jerry Springer on "Dancing With the Stars."

If so, Robert is Jerry Springer.

"OK, OK, OK," he says in his "'Crocodile' Dundee" accent, setting his jaw and rolling his eyes upward. "Let's try that one more time, slower."

He's my perfect partner.

We dance in an old mansion in the San Telmo neighborhood, in a room that faces the street so that passers-by can peek inside. The walls are covered with colorful oil paintings of singers and dancers. The teachers are young and kind, though not above poking a little fun at our mistakes.

Because Robert and I are beginners and don't want to spend money on special shoes, we dance in our socks on a floor that I can best describe as smooth brick. This means slightly sore feet, because tango is all about sliding.

If I get more serious, I'll have to buy shoes and take private lessons. But for now, this will suffice. There are moments when I feel I'm really dancing, and those are truly wonderful moments.

It beats the heck out of ballet, I'll tell you that.

Here today, gone mañana

Back to this men thing. I've always had a lot of male friends. But here it seems nearly impossible to meet women. I talk to them in restaurants and hair salons and stores, but they never invite me anywhere the way men do. And my language school had more male students than female, perhaps because there are fewer women in the world who head off on a foreign adventure solo. There are a few, and I've been out in groups with some of them.

What makes things more difficult is that expatriate friendships operate at warp speed. At work, I probably experienced friendship turnover every couple of years as people moved on to new jobs. Here, friendship turnover occurs every couple of weeks.

Robert's gone now, off to Europe. And when I sent a message to a group of schoolmates the other day inviting them to a trivia night sponsored by the Explorers Club, one e-mailed back to say that she'd already returned to her hometown of Boston, and another to say he was traveling in the south of Argentina.

My new motto is "Don't get too attached."

But you always, always have to keep putting yourself out there. And so, last week, I invited a woman in my tango class to join me for dinner one night next week. Like me, she's a former journalist. But she's from Barcelona, and she's here indefinitely. Who knows? I might make my first female friend here yet.