Pammie is Confused About the Mexican Ballet

Now I am not so happy about my delayed flights because I have ordered tickets to see the Ballet Folklorico in Mexico City, show time scheduled a slim two hours after my originally scheduled landing time, and I am going to miss it. The ballet is a two hour spectacular (according to the brochure) of all the regional dances and music throughout Mexico, and has been performing for many years and tours the world. For the past few weeks I spent hours at work surreptitiously trolling internet sites looking to buy tickets online. My guide book says there are performances on Wednesday and Sunday evenings only, and I will be there Saturday evening, so I can make the Sunday performance. They book out fast, they say, hurry pammie hurry!! Gosh I have less than a week before the performance, I’m frantic. Ticketmaster Mexico has tickets for $400 on Wednesday only, and I won’t be there on Wednesday, what the….$400!!! Sheesh, I don’t like the ballet that much, far out. I delete that browser window fast.

I realize later that the peso is also designated by the $ sign, and there is 10 pesos to the dollar, so US$40 for a ticket. Heh heh. Wouldn't be my first currency exchange confusion. Ticketmaster has a plan of the theatre seating arrangements so you can select where you want to sit. I check Ticketmaster every day up to the Friday morning before I leave and they still never offer tickets for sale for the Sunday performance. Meanwhile I've been keeping my eye on another dodgy looking web site that advertises tickets for $18 for Saturday night, the night I arrive. So I buy those tickets at the last minute. I wonder why they have performances on Saturday, since all my information says Wednesdays and Sundays only? but what the heck.

The dodgy website has no plan of the seats so when I buy the tickets on their form I type in a request in the comments field I ask for the best possible seats and please not on the balcony because I hear you cannot see all the stage from there, and Pammie has suffered bad experiences with expensive box seats before, in Vienna, for instance (13% view of the lower left stage where no one ever stands, and 87% view of the box seats opposite). They write back and say they have bought my tickets for me and to collect them at the box office, but that it is free seating (I always wince at these words and imagine a huge shoving crowd free for all fighting for the best seats), and there is no balcony, I must be thinking of the theatre in San Juan, which does have a balcony. Huh? I have no idea what they are talking about.

I finally make the next flight from NYC to Miami (3 hours), and have an hour’s layover there. I see on CNN on the TV terminals that they have caught the guy who let off the bomb at the Atlanta Olympics, and am appalled to see the hyper dramatic news coverage, with thundering increasingly hysterical movie theme type music blaring and flaming red hotrod headlines zooming across the screen. How embarrassing. Why can’t they just report the daily news from around the world instead of turning this one incident into a big Hollywood event? It seems like CNN just lurches from one dramatic crisis to another.