We Are The Champions - Sep. 1st

AuthorMessage
CristhyneS
Jackass
CristhyneS
Age: 33
Gender: Female
Posts: 1400

Mibba
September 8th, 2005 at 03:53pm
This was my experience with the Green Day concert

It was December 24th when I got the American Idiot album, I really didn’t pay that much attention to it, I would just listen American Idiot and Boulevard of Broken Dreams, it wasn’t until January 1st that I listened the whole album. I was travelling from Maracaibo to Caracas (my home, which is in Venezuela), and the car broke down, so the travel that was like of 5 or 6 hour, turn into a travel of 14 hours, and I was really bored, so I started to listen to the American Idiot album while reading the lyrics of the songs that I was listening. I was going through a really big depression, I was going through a hard time and at the same time a lot of my “friends” turned their back on me and stabbed me in the back, so it was in that exactly moment when I found Green Day’s music, and it was also a moment when politics was the only thing that people would talk about in my country, since we have a president who is stealing our money and taking away our democracy, but like I’m 14 years old “I have no say about that”. So when I heard to American Idiot and its lyrics for the first time I felt that somebody was able to feel a pain like I was feeling and to think the way that I was thinking about everything in my life at that time, and that somebody was able to understand my opinion about the political situation in my country right now and the way that I was feeling about it, even when American Idiot talks about the political situation in the U.S.A.
“American Idiot” and “Holiday” are the songs that tell what I think about the political situation in my country right now.
“Wake Me Up When September Ends” was the song that represented my depression, because it was on September when my depression started, “Here comes the rain again / Falling from the stars / Drenched in my pain again / Becoming who we are / As my memory rests / But never forgets what I lost / Wake me up when September Ends”, there couldn’t be a better way to tell how I was feeling.
“Whatsername” “was the song about” my friends turning their back on me, specially about who I thought that was one of my two best friends, who turn his back on me, and who hasn’t talk to me again since almost a year ago, even thought he’s seat in the classroom is behind mine.
But in general, the whole album, and the whole story sounds kind of “about me”.
Since the day that I really listened to the American Idiot album, it took me about 2 months to get all their older album, it was really hard to find them in my country (I had original copies of 1039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hour and The International Super Hits just a couple of days ago, so now the only one that I don’t have in an original copy is Kerplunk, but I’m still looking for it).
So that was the introduction, here’s the story that I want to tell:
In my country it is used that when the girls turn 15 years old they get a big birthday party, and I find that really stupid, I think that to turn 14 or 16 years old is the same that turning 15 years old, but my sister wanted me to have a party, but I’ve never liked birthday parties because everyone enjoys it more than you and is also really easy to forget the party that you had last year, and I usually forget the parties really quickly. But I used that whole thing about the turning to 15 being special to convince my family to buy me tickets for the Green Day concert that was going to take place on August 26th in Florida, and obviously the tickets to flight to Miami. And after 30 minutes of begging I convinced my family, and they accepted to give me that as my birthday present/gift.
That same day we called my older sister (she’s 34 years old), who lives in Miami, and we asked her to buy the tickets on the Internet (but my dad was going to pay for them anyway, and the cost of the tickets was 45$), which was 2 days before the tickets were on pre-sale. She told my mom that she was going to do it the same day that tickets were coming on pre-sale and she also told my mom that her computer wasn’t working and that they were already fixing it. The day that the tickets were going to be on pre-sale was already here, but my sister’s computer wasn’t working yet, so she told us “I’ll do it tomorrow”, but “tomorrow” would always come, and my sister’s computer wasn’t working yet, but for some strange reason she was always online. So on May 16th (2 days after the tickets came on-sale) I decided to check ticketmaster.com, and then I realized that the best seats that were still available were on the section 322 or something like that, those were seats behind the stage. I was crying when I told that to my mom so she called my other sister, Carine (she’s 32 and lives in Venezuela) and told her the situation. My sister told that to her husband who almost immediately checked the Internet and looked for tickets on re-sale. We found tickets for great seats for 400$, there were different prices, but we found good seats for 120$, and my father gave the money to buy them to my sister’s husband, and after 8 long days he bought the tickets. We paid 343$ for those tickets (the 2 tickets + taxes + shipping). We had really great seats (Section 119, row 22) so I was really happy. That day I started to count the days that there were left for the day of the concert, that day was May 24th, and there were 94 days left (I counted day by day).
I was one step closer to the concert, but I was still really far away. My passport had expired 2 months ago by that date, but I wasn’t able to renovate it no more because now all the Venezuelans needed a new passport. So my family had to pay a lot of money to get our new passports quickly, but anyway we had to wait in line for about 12 hours, starting at 2am. But well, after the whole process ended we waited 2 or 3 weeks to get our passport. Now we needed to renovate the visa to travel to the U.S.A. It took us like a month to send to the embassy all the documents that we needed to ask for the renovation of our visas. After we sent it we had to wait a week to go to the embassy, to complete all the requests of the embassy to have a visa renovation. It was a long wait for the visa; I was biting my nails like never before, when there were 20 days left before the concert I thought that we wouldn’t get our visas on time so we couldn’t make it to the concert, but after 2 weeks, that seemed like an eternity to me, we got our visas, by that day there were 16 days left.
Then the problem was lack of money to buy the tickets to fly from Venezuela to Miami. My father was supposed to pay for those tickets, but at the end it was my sister Carine who paid it. Then I was happy like never before in my whole life. We talked with my sister, the one that lives in Miami, the weekend before the day of the concert, to ask her if there were hurricanes around, and she answered our question with a very convincing “NO”.
On Wednesday, Aug. 24th, around 9pm I turned on the T.V., and found nothing but bad news, there was a hurricane going to Florida, Katrina, and it was expected to get in exactly in the same place where the concert was going to be, I couldn’t sleep that night.
The next day my sister and I went to the international airport of my country (which is 2 hour away from my home) without being sure if the flight or/and the concert were going to be cancelled. We were in the airport, we were the next in the line to check in, a woman came out and told everyone in the line “the flight has been cancelled because the Miami airport has been closed because of the Katrina hurricane”. Since that moment all that my sister Carine and I wanted was the concert to be postponed. We went from the airport back to Caracas, and we went to my sister’s office, where we checked the Internet to see if the concert was still going to take place, and more bad news, yes, the concert was still going to take place. We call to the airline where we were going to travel, they told us that there was a flight the next day at 6am, and that by that time that flight was still scheduled to go to Miami. To get on that flight we needed to be at the airport at 2:30am, and it wasn’t sure that we would be able to get that flight because we weren’t confirmed for that flight.
That day we got back home at 7pm or something, and we went to bed at 9pm. I couldn’t sleep that night either. But anyway we needed to get up at 1am, to get ready to go to the airport, at 2am we were on the road to the airport (again), and we got there at 3:30am. We had luck and got checked in for that flight. But the flight was going to depart delayed (at 10am), and it was Aug. 26th, the day of the concert, but taking that flight we would be at the stadium where the concert was going to be right on time. So my sister and I went up stairs to have breakfast, when we came back to the gate, the flight had been cancelled. We decided to stay at the airport to see if we had the chance to get checked in for the flight that was going to be departing a 4pm, taking that flight, I probably wouldn’t be able to make it to the concert on time, but at least I would have catch more than a half of the concert. But when they closed the flight, it was full already.
This time I had no hopes of watching Green Day live…there were like 20 minutes of an empty silence, until my sister smashed it, she said “where’s the next concert?”, I didn’t know exactly where the next concert was going to be, but I knew that there was one on September 1st.
We called to American Airlines to ask the price of a flight from Miami to New Jersey, they told us 150$ per ticket.
We went back home, and I checked in the Internet the prices of the tickets for the concert in NJ, good tickets would cost around 150$ per ticket. I talked on the msn with Becky, this girl that I had met around 2 months ago in a Green Day forum, I knew that she was going to the concert in NJ, so I asked her about the nearest airport to the stadium where the concert was going to take place, and I asked her in what section was she going to be, to see if I could get tickets for that same section. The first thing she told me was “We gotta meet there”. Then she told me that she had 2 extra tickets, I asked her for how much would she sell them to me, and she asked her mom, who told her that she would give us those tickets for free, it was a really good new, the first good news in the last 3 day. But there was a bad new, what else could anyone expect by that time?. Here’s the bad news, I checked on the Internet the prices of the flights to NJ, and the flights on the date that I wanted them were between 560$ and 1000$ on the economy class.
My sister obviously had lots of doubts about if the right thing to do was going to NJ. We needed to make a decision in that exactly moment, are we going to travel to Miami to see if we can go to the concert in NJ?, I told my sister Carine that if we weren’t going to the concert in NJ, I didn’t want to go to Miami, since it was in Miami where my depression started…
It was Monday, Aug. 29th, 10am, and my sister and I were on the road to the international airport of my country (yeah, once again). That day we got checked in for the flight on that afternoon. At 4:20pm we were departing to the Miami international airport.
At 7:30 we were already in Miami, my older sister picked us up at the airport. She and her husband are the most pessimist people in the earth, and they’re not supportive at all, so you people figure out what they were telling us about going to NJ and all that stuff, because I don’t want to say bad things about my older sister and her husband, even when everybody who knows them knows that I wouldn’t be telling lies.
The next day (Aug. 30) we went to their office, where we checked on the Internet, in a web site that somebody told us that would be help full, where we could find cheap travel packages. And that “somebody” wasn’t wrong, we found a really cheap package that included the 2 tickets for the flight from Miami to NJ., and 2 nights in a cheap hotel, for the price of 728$.
I talked to Becky on the msn again, and she told me a phone number to call her mom, because my older annoying sister and her annoying husband wanted to talk to Becky’s mom before buying the tickets for the flight and all that stuff, to make sure that Becky wasn’t lying and that she was really going to give us the tickets for free. But well, my older sister (she speaks English, Carine doesn’t) called Becky’s mom who told her that yes, she was going to give us the 2 tickets for free. So we went back to the computer to buy the travel package, but it wasn’t there anymore. I felt a horrible panic for 2 hours, then the travelling package was there again, and we bought it.
That same day we found out that the cousin of my one of my cousins live in NJ, we talked to them (the Mendoza family), and they realized how lost we were going to be at NJ, so Simon (Simón Mendoza) told us that he was going to give us a ride from the hotel to the concert and from the concert back to the hotel.
2 days after that, on September 1st, the day of the concert in NJ, the annoying husband of my annoying sister was giving us a ride to the Miami airport. When my sister and I got there we realized that our flight was delayed (just 30 minutes), and we were going to connect flights in Atlanta, so we would have just 10 minutes to get from the gate where we were going to arrive to the gate where the flight from Atlanta to Newark was going to depart, but somehow we made it.
We were already in the hotel in NJ, and soon Becky was there giving me the tickets, I was really exited.
And soon after that, Simon was there picking us up to give us a ride to the Giants Stadium, were the concert was going to take place.
I was inside the stadium, and it was really “giant”, everything was different from how it would be in my country, but for sure everything was great, including Becky, her mom (Wendy), her brother, and everything else…
All the sacrifices and all the money that we spent, and everything else that we had gone through to go to a Green Day concert was totally worth it, the concert was everything that I expected, and even more. Is kind of surreal the facts that we got to the concert and that we got to watch Green Day performing live, but is great. And it doesn’t matter your political beliefs, or your feelings about the war or anything else related to that, but there’s something that Green Day has been saying for a while that is totally true:
We are the leaders of our life, so we gotta do what we believe in, and fight for it, we got to fight ‘til the end and try our best to get what we want, we can’t let anybody to rule our life, because we have the power, we just gotta make sure to use to have a better life in a better world.
If after all the problems that I went through to get to go to a Green Day concert, I still got to do it, I’m sure as hell that we are able to get whatever we want if we fight for it, so don’t you ever let somebody tell you that you can’t do something that you really want to do, because “We Are The Champions”.
CristhyneS
Jackass
CristhyneS
Age: 33
Gender: Female
Posts: 1400

Mibba
September 8th, 2005 at 03:57pm
I know is really long, but I think is worth reading it
CristhyneS
Jackass
CristhyneS
Age: 33
Gender: Female
Posts: 1400

Mibba
September 8th, 2005 at 07:22pm
Come on people, read it and tell me what you think
**extraordinary_girl**
Shoot Me, I'm A Newbie
**extraordinary_girl**
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Posts: 8
September 11th, 2005 at 12:11pm
god you went through so much to go to a Green Day concert. you are very determined and that's a good thing.
CristhyneS
Jackass
CristhyneS
Age: 33
Gender: Female
Posts: 1400

Mibba
September 11th, 2005 at 12:49pm
Thanks
Eliana Rampage
Jackass
Eliana Rampage
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Posts: 1958
September 11th, 2005 at 08:31pm
Omg that's so touching...I went through problems too...like 5....through getting tickets to getting to the convert as well...You are so lucky you got the chance to go, I almost lost mine like 10 times....

~Eli
Heather
Idiot
Heather
Age: 37
Gender: Female
Posts: 804
September 11th, 2005 at 10:22pm
WOW!...........thats all i have too say!!!.......You are like the ultimate Green Day Fan for going through all of that!
flippen_sweet
Shoot Me, I'm A Newbie
flippen_sweet
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Posts: 17
September 16th, 2005 at 10:53pm
thats was long!!! Shocked
CristhyneS
Jackass
CristhyneS
Age: 33
Gender: Female
Posts: 1400

Mibba
September 18th, 2005 at 07:20pm
Yeah I know it was long...and thanks to everyone for their comments
*i_love_greenday*
Geek
*i_love_greenday*
Age: -
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Posts: 187
September 19th, 2005 at 04:42pm
Aw that rocks. You're well lucky to see them.
CristhyneS
Jackass
CristhyneS
Age: 33
Gender: Female
Posts: 1400

Mibba
September 19th, 2005 at 06:42pm
Yes I am...I'm wishing they to come over here now to see them with my friend from here that enjoy there music too...should be great...we're really wild here, they would get impressed to see all the people "dying" on the mosh pit.
State Radio
Falling In Love With The Board
State Radio
Age: 32
Gender: Male
Posts: 6583
September 28th, 2005 at 08:25pm
thats a good story you got there partner
CristhyneS
Jackass
CristhyneS
Age: 33
Gender: Female
Posts: 1400

Mibba
September 30th, 2005 at 06:32pm
Thanks
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