Sometimes the stars align

Ali's mother and sister arrived safely Saturday after a very long trip from Tampa.  They brought gifts for the kids, food, clothes, and a much needed lens cap for my camera.  Not sure how they fit all that stuff in their luggage but we are very grateful.  

Anyway, back to the "stars align" theme.  Ali has a friend from Tampa who is a big DJ (Tony Faline) who was coming into town to play a music festival here called Retro 2011.  As the festival was on the same day Ali's family was arriving, we had some concerns about how the timing would work out.  As they were pretty beat up from the trip they went to bed with the kids around 9 and so we had our childcare set.  The first star was in place. 

Turns out Tony wasn't spinning until 4 AM!  "Oh boy!"  After a brief moment of hesitation, we cowboy'd up and decided to put our big girl panties on and go.  We left the house around 11 PM and had some drinks across the river on calle Betis then headed over to the venue.  The festival was being held at a big outdoor amphitheater in Isla Cartuja.

http://www.sevillismoymas.com/2010/05/sin-noticias-de-la-final-en-el-auditorio-rocio-jurado/

We arrived to a crowd of crazed, undulating, gyrating young people with pacifiers and dilated pupils.  The entrance was packed with hundreds of people trying to get through the bottleneck the understaffed entrance security had created.  It was a mess.  We explained our guest list ultra-VIP status to the security guard, but to no avail.  We would have to brave the line with the lollypop kids.  Well, that just wasn't going to work.  Did we mention we were on the guest list?  After a few moments of deliberation, we made the only logical decision: bribe the security guard, which we did.  He must have found us amusing or something and let us through.  The looks of disbelief on the faces of the Spaniards waiting around us were priceless.  We were in.  The second star was aligned. 

After a very invasive pat down (at least buy me a drink first guys), we were let into the amphitheater and went to looking for Tony.  Amazingly, we found him pretty quickly after figuring out where the artists were hanging out.  He was able to get us backstage passes and we spent the entire night backstage hanging out with the artists and watching them spin.  The third star was in place. 

I am a big fan of electronic music, so to say I was like a kid in a candy store would be an understatement.  Tony's set was amazing and he had some hard core fans up front that he went down and met with afterwards.  Very cool.  It was a very unique experience and Ali and I had a great time with Tony and his wife Raquel.  Thank you guys!  We arrived home at the tender hour of 6.