Jason Mraz Concert – Festival Hall, West Melbourne

I was surfing Facebook when I received an update from the Jason Mraz page, about his upcoming Australia tour. Yeah I knew he was going to hold one concert at Palais Theatre, St Kilda on the 20th of April 2009. Earlier on I tried to get tickets for this concert, but to my dismay, all were sold out! Disheartened, I was even more annoyed to know that the Singapore concert was held on 5 March 2009, when I already had to be back in Melbourne.

So back to the update I received, it appeared that another concert had been added! On the 21st April 2009, it was to be held at Festival Hall, West Melbourne. And there were still tickets available! On a high, I went to check out ticketmaster.com.au. The w

ebsite has this annoying feature where you have to enter a text code to ensure you’re human. And after trying for a while (I have a slow internet connection), it turned out that they were down for maintenance. Okay… I was up at a very strange time.. but… so are there tickets or not? Surprise surprise! There were really tickets available! At $71.90 a head, I was going to put my credit card number for one, then for some serendipitous reason, I landed on ebay.com.au, and I realised that I could use ebay to search for tickets! Maybe? 🙂

And there were! There were actually bi

ds starting at A$0.99. Is that crazy or what? Anyway, I decided that if I had to spend $71.90, and if I could make my money’s worth on 2 tickets, someone could benefit from it! So I texted ZX and asked if he was free on that night. Turned out that he was, and I was thrilled.

Fast forward to a few hours bef

ore the bid. It was a Saturday. I was studying for a test that day, and also kept my eyes on the auction, which was to end at 15.55pm AEST. About 15 minutes before the auction ended, I placed my bid. My maximum bid was 50, then 70, then 100, because at the last 5 minutes there was another girl (I’m sure it’s a female) who was trying to win my bid! Thankfully I had a higher maximum bid of 100, and I won the auction at $79! Can you imagine how sad I would be if I had lost it by $9?!

Fresh from winning the bid, I called ZX to share my excitement, and proceeded to email the seller about details for collection. Fast forward to the next day, there were still no replies from him/her, and I was feeling frantic. I tried everything to contact him/her, from sending a second email, to trying to Google the seller! At last, I found a function within ebay that could give me the telephone number! I called, and spoke to her over the phone, and turned out that it’s her son who’s selling it. He called me back a few hours later, and turned out that he works in the city! Awesome, so I met up with him at Docklands (World Trade Centre/Melbourne West Police Centre), and got the tickets at a discount! 🙂

On Tuesday, ZX and I walked down to Bourke St to take tram 86. We alighted at Spencer/La Trobe St, and tried to find our way there. I forgot to print out the map! There was another caucasian couple in front of us, and I reckoned that they were going for the concert too, so I tried to ask them for directions. Turned out that they didn’t know where Festival Hall is too! After asking 2 strangers, we were finally shown the way there. And it’s quite a long walk, about 5-10 minutes at least, but we were glad to have finally reached there. And we reached there early, at about 6.20pm.

We walked around Festival Hall to Door 3, which was not on Dudley St, but behind on Rosslyn St. It was quite a long wait, and we had to finish our water before going in (no water bottles allowed – why didn’t I learn from my Gary Chau concert lesson?!). It’s because they were selling bottles at $4 each!

After the doors opened, we were shown the way to our seats. And since we were the first to enter, and the concert isn’t going to start any time soon, we walked to the merchandise booth, and saw really nice t-shirts on sale at $35 each, and various CDs. There was a really nice yellow one that I liked, but they ran out of my size. ZX saw a black one and recommended it to me, but my mind was set on the yellow one. So I asked the merchandise booth guy if there were going to be extra stock coming by, and he said there might. So I waited. (Waited waited until the end of the concert and there still weren’t any :() We waited for quite some time, and I decided to get the Black one, just in case I can’t get any t-shirt if I waited till the end!

The concert started with Lisa Mitchell – crap. Then Eric Hutchinson – OK, but I didn’t know any of his songs. And finally Jason Mraz started with Song for A Friend!

This is the setlist:

01. Song For a Friend [07:57]
02. Make It Mine [03:25]
03. Did You Get My Message? [04:29]
04. The Only Life You Can Save [04:27]
05. Only Human [08:02]
06. A Beautiful Mess [08:17]
07. Mary Jane [05:09]
08. Dynamo of Volition [05:50]
09. I’m Yours [08:53]
10. Fall Through Glass^ [06:57]
11. Copchase [06:18]

Encore:

12. Mr Curiosity [05:26]
13. Butterfly [07:51]

And a live recording can be found here.

It was really nice to sway and sing to the familiar songs, and to enjoy the unfamillar ones. ZX was also very nice to record videos of the concert for me.

After the concert, we headed to Supper Inn at Chinatown for supper (obviously? :)), where he had roast duck congee and I had meatball congee. It’s the typical Cantonese congee that I love. So it was a nice ending to the night.

🙂 🙂