For some events in Pinoso you can buy tickets online but for most of the events in our 400 plus seat theatre you have to get tickets, or invitations, from the box office which opens for a couple hours for a couple of nights before the event. It's a bit of a pain for us because we're not usually in town in the evenings so we have to drive in specially. We've learned that normally we can chance to luck and there will be tickets available on the night. You can't do that with Taules though.
I'd misread the programme information. I thought tickets were on sale from 4pm. In fact it was 6pm. I didn't realise though because, when I got there, there were about 40 people waiting. Now the Spanish have a queuing system that I've mentioned before. They don't, usually, stand in a line but, as you arrive, you ask who is the last person in the queue and so take your place - let's call that virtual queuing. This causes confusion when foreigners, like we Britons, stand behind the person we think is the last in line. We may be queue jumping because the line usually only represents a part of the virtual queue. I asked who was last in the post office the other day and a woman sitting on a chair pointed to a Briton and said "He is, but he doesn't know, so I probably am." She may have been just a little peeved.
As I arrived outside the theatre I was assigned my place in the order. Over the next fifty minutes though the system started to creak as people came and went, children, coming from school, joined their waiting parents whilst cousins, aunts and brothers in law stood with other family members. The noise level was rowdy. I still didn't realise I was early and I was seething about the delay and unfairly cursing Spanish organisation.
When the man from the theatre group did turn up there was a loud cheer so I still didn't realise I was early; I just thought he was late. We all jostled and pushed into the theatre lobby behind him and any semblance of place in the queue vanished. Then the theatre bloke explained. Tickets would go on sale at the advertised time, 6pm, about an hour away. There were going to be separate desks for each of the three performances and they were going to set up posts and ropes to organise a physical queue. We were asked to organise ourselves so that the new physical queue had the same order as the original virtual queue. That involved leaving the theatre and finding your rightful place. I'm not good at forceful and I realised I'd end up at the back of the queue if I did as asked so I hung back a little and dropped into the reforming queue more or less where I belonged. Then we waited for the sales desks to open.
Progress to the three desks was painfully slow but I did, finally, get there. Choosing seats involved a Biro and a photocopied diagramme of the theatre. Paying involved banknotes and coins. I was surprised how many seats had gone. People must have been buying shed loads of tickets at a time because I wasn't that far back in the line. Not many people behind me were going to get in on Sunday evening so maybe all the bumping and shuffling and standing around was actually worthwhile. If I'd turned up at six I'm not sure I'd have got any tickets.
