Sunday, November 30, 2008

Last Night in Zoli

I'm sitting in my soon to be ex-apartment spending what will be my last night as a resident of this apartment. Then it's off to the city centre to organise the life I've progressively trucked over there for the past month. Including the cat, who turned out to be an apartment...floozy, really. 10 minutes in the new place and he had checked out every corner, pawed both the couch and beds, and found a necklace belonging neither to me nor my new flatmate. What a treasure hunter I've landed myself!

This past month has really been mostly work and slowly moving. Yesterday, though, we went to an afternoon showing of Phantom of the Opera, which wasn't the Andrew Lloyd Weber version, but another one. One that probably should have never been made. In its defence, I guess you could say it was more of a "Phantom light", as the whole thing was rather hokey. In a nutshell, we laughed a good deal, mostly at the wrong times (if one were to look from the director's/writer's persective), and I even did so to tears.

The most exciting part of the show was before we actually got into the stadium (bad placement...), when the Belgian friend of one of our group looked at her ticket and said "I don't want to ruin the fun, but is it normal if the ticket says 6 p.m. Friday?" We were waiting to get in for the 3 p.m. show Saturday.

WHAT???

So we start to think - or more realistically, I started to panic. Yes, I picked the tickets up the same morning, Saturday, so why wouldn't the woman at the ticket counter been all "Umm... I'll give you your tickets, but they're worthless."? Yes, I read the sign at the counter that said "PLEASE CHECK YOUR TICKETS BEFORE YOU LEAVE THE COUNTER!!!" Did I check them? Of COURSE not! This is Riga! And why would I have bought the tickest for Friday, since I have class Fridays, and we even remembered having a discussion on which time for Saturday would be best. We decide/hope it's a print errorSo I start to scheme - we'll get to the doors and if they put up a stink I'll tell them I saw the mistake and informed the woman, but she waved her hand and said it would be alright.

But we get to the doors and all they check are purses and bags. They rip the stubs off of our tickets and we're in. We go to our row and see - yes, someone is already sitting there. So someway, somehow, yours truly supergenius managed to buy tickets for the exact day and time the entire group had decided AGAINST. Luckily a fellow North American was working the tech booth (total fluke - Julija ran into him while trying to find someone to explain which doors we were supposed to enter through) and he told us to just wait until lights down, scope out seats and, if anyone came to bother us, send them right to him. REEE-SULT!

Thus, although the show wasn't the best (we decided before we even got in that we have seen enough crap shows over the past year to prepare us for anything out there), we ended up sitting about two price sections up from where we had purchased our tickets. I guess we weren't the only ones "seat-surfing", as an older woman entered the row we had picked before us, sat down, said "Man nepatik!" ("I don't like it!") and then got up to move somewhere else.

Like I said, this is Riga.

Oh, and I have nothing for breakfast here except coffee, cheese and mustard. And the room is eerily empty. I feel like I'm right back in college circa 2005 and my first weeks in Germany. Memories.

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