Even it rained heavily outside the stadium, it was full of heat and energy for the 2.5 hours long performance from Santana! Just one night in Auckland, we managed to buy the tickets at the door (very lucky) and even they were side seats, they were not as bad as we thought. Honestly I had no idea what Santana was about or any of their music, but I always know Emily is crazy about them/him and so once I read from the newspaper about their concert tonight, immediately we tried to buy the tickets in every way we could.
I was in charge of trademe while she was trying her luck with ticketmaster, the official website for selling the tickets. It was a pretty intense process… coz one person was selling 2 tickets at the auction site which at that time we believed they were better seats than the ones available from ticketmaster. We waited till the last 2 minutes to start our bid, and the price went up from $160 to $175, then $176, $178, $180, $182, $185, $190, $194, $196, $197, $198… basically became a bidding war between me and another buyer. Originally I stopped, but in the last 13 seconds I placed $199, and so the auction extended for another 2 minutes…. and that 2 minutes was very long indeed, probably I had refreshed my browser like a hundred times while I was waiting. Finally… we won! Well $199 was the official selling price for those tickets, and so we were happy about it and wrote an email to the seller immediately after my heart calmed down a bit.
Then we waited, and waited. Wrote another 2 emails, no replies. Managed to find their phone number (from one of their earlier post in some other auctions), phoned them, no one answered. Left voice message, emailed them again… nothing! Until 6:40pm (the concert started at 8pm and we won the auction around 4:30pm) finally got hold of him from the phone, and he told me that he sold the tickets to someone else already… did not even apologize and tried to blame everything to his wife… we were so disappointed at that time… felt like being cheated in a way but could not really do anything about it (I mean there is no penalty for people listing item in trademe for sales while they do not really possess with them). At one point we thought we would not go, coz the remaining seats were looking pretty bad from ticketmaster’s website. Luckily I still decided to visit the venue and “see how that goes”.
No doubt this is the first time for me to be in a concert, where the vocals or singers are not in the leading role at all. A 60 years old guy with 2 guitars on his shoulder was the spotlight for 90% of the show, and it was pretty amazing to see him playing like his fingers disjointed from his palm from time to time… also a lot of credits to the drum player, and the base guitarist… overall, I enjoyed the music so much even a lot of them I have never heard before.
Santana said, “if I am not living in the States, this probably would be the place I want to live in.” I bet he said that in every country he visited 
