And here’s the long story. (Seriously, this is very long). It’s really unbelievable that I got a second chance to watch my newest favorite artist, Girls’ Generation, for the second time in this year. Just realised that I have never shared anything about them in this blog. In fact, I wrote something about my trip to their concert early this year but it’s still kept as draft. Hope this one got the chance to get out.
So yesterday (at the time I’m writing this), I attended the SMTown Live World Tour III in Jakarta. This year is really the year of concerts in Indonesia. There have been so many concert held here in Indonesia. And many of some of them are KPop Concert. There was the Super Junior’s Super Show few months ago. And there’s this SMTown I’m writing about. And I believe there will be Big Bang and Wonder Girls.
At first, I was not really interested attending the SMTown. The reason was that because Girls’ Generation wouldn’t be performing by themselves in the concert. SMTown is a joint performance by all of artists under the label of SM Entertainment. Since I only like Girls’ Generation, it should be understandable why I wasn’t interested. The second reason was that because I didn’t find friends to watch with. I though (and it turned out that I was right) would have been so boring to watch the performances for the artists that I didn’t really know. So watching with a friend might lighten up the burden. And for the final reason, I was too late to book the ticket. And then the tickets were sold out, or so what I believed.
Few weeks later, I read in SoneID’s (the Indonesian fanbase for Girls’ Generation) twitter that they had a ticket available for Festival B. Not the site that I wanted, but since two of my friends confirmed that they also bought the same tickets, I guessed that was no brainer. So I contacted the person and bought the ticket.
Right before the dawn of the concert day, I took a travel car from Bandung to Jakarta. It wasn’t my intention to get on the head of the entrance queue. But the person from whom I bought the ticket said that she would be in the venue in the morning so I assumed she might want to be on the queue earlier and I respected that. Just minutes after I hopped on the car and sit, several girls also got into the car. From the look of it, I guessed that those girls also wanted to watch the concert. And I thought they were most likely fans of Super Junior.
Apparently I was right, well, for the half of my guesses actually. I asked one of them (and actually she was pretty cute, though) about it after the car reached its pool in Jakarta. I didn’t bother to ask in the car because I just mastered this technique to sleep for whole Bandung to Jakarta trip and I wanted to try it. I did successfully wake up right when the car entered the pool, but it wasn’t really important. The important thing was they were actually going to watch SMTown, although when I asked about my second guess, they strongly denied that they were fans of Super Junior.
What made it good was they were also fans of Girls’ Generation just like me. And what made it even better was they were also from ITB, although not from the same major as I was; they were from mathematics major while I was graduated from computer science. But nevertheless, it was really nice to meet people with a couple of things in common. And since I was more senior in both topics about Girls’ Generation and ITB, I didn’t throw a single chance to brag. I told them stories about when I attended the Girls’ Generation Tour earlier this year and when I still studied at ITB. I even showed a picture from the former topic. They were quite enthusiastic. I was feeling bad that we couldn’t watch the concert together because we had separate seating sections. My ticket was for Festival section and theirs were for Tribune section.
Here’s the first entry at Gate 2.
After talking for nearly half of an hour, I had to part with them to meet the person who got my ticket. I was a little bit in hurry because I was planning to go elsewhere after I got my ticket. Then I walked (which was very very far) from Grand Lucky to Gelora Bung Karno, the venue. And I found that the venue was already crowded although it was still 8 in the morning. I wasn’t surprised. There will always be fans who take a lot of effort to be right in front of their beloved idols. In most of cases I heard, their struggling were fruitful, or at least in this concert I’m writing about.
The queue was already long in the morning.
After contacting the person (okay, her name is Delvina, writing her as “person” is very rude), I soon realized that I came into the wrong gate. I arrived at Gate 2 while our meeting should be at Gate 1. It was a very long way between those two gates. And I was already tired walking under Jakarta’s hot sun. So I took an ojeg to Gate 1.
There at Gate 2, the crowd was so enormous. And it was growing even bigger for every minute I spent waiting for Delvina to come. After waiting for almost two hours, I got a text from her that she was already in one of the booth. I went to her and got the ticket.
So this was the ticket.
Now here’s a funny thing. At that time I already knew that Festival A would be crowded by Girls’ Generation fans (or Sone, as we are usually called). All those Sones was going to have an event for the girls so they were organized into Festival A section. Since I was too late to book the ticket, I could only get my hand on the Festival B section ticket. That was good enough for me. The funny thing is that apparently the Super Junior fans (or ELF) were gathered and that day I wore blue t-shirt, the official color of the ELFs. That’s why when Delvina handed the ticket to me, she was joking, “It’s a good thing that you wear blue, you know.” Actually that time I was afraid for the ELFs. Rumor has it that they are pretty nasty fans. I was hoping so much that there wouldn’t be something bad happened at my section.
And then there was still that matter of waiting for the concert itself. I remembered my companions who were the reason I bought the ticket, Aswin and Devon. I repeatedly texted Devon just to find that he woke up really late. He had told me before that he was planning to arrive very early to join those ambitious fans. I could only laugh. I told him to bring some water, snacks, and umbrella if he was really going to queue from that morning.
What about me? Did I start queuing at that time? Nope, I went to fX, a mall near Gelora Bung Karno. But before I went, I met once more with the girls whom I met earlier in the morning (including that cute one). I was so ashamed because she was the one who greeted me first and she remembered my name while I didn’t. And they were a little bit confused about the queue. Yeah, the queue were chaos but I’ll get on that later. At that time I also didn’t have a clue about the queue, but I overheard from someone that those who got Tribune section tickets should queue at Gate 2. I retold what I overheard to them. It occurred to me later that it didn’t matter because after going through both gates, you would meet the second entries more horrible. So, wherever you are, if you are reading this, I apologize if my explanation made you uncomfortable by any means. And I kind of regret that I didn’t ask for your phone number (oops!).
While I’m writing this, I feel a little bit sleepy. So I think I’ll just publish this and continue the rest (hopefully) tomorrow.
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For my session, I shared about what I have learned during the development of UrbanIndo and from my interactions with other people in the start-up environment. And for the conclusion I gave some heads-up for the students if they want to start their own web company, e.g. how to start, how to develop their ideas into working prototypes rapidly, how to raise money, what to expect from their early consumers, etc.
