The Flamenco performance that almost wasn’t

When I was in Spain over the winter vacation, I went to a Flamenco performance done by Roma in a cave. When Sonia’s Spanish connections here in Kazan said there was going to be a classical Famenco performance here last Sunday, we jumped at the chance. She ordered the tickets online and since the performance was at 6 p.m., we decided to meet Ravil and Lorene for at late lunch and just hang out until the performance.
We went to the Uzbekistan restaurant, which happened to be very close to the concert hall. Lucky us. Of course everything was WAY too much to eat, but it was good. I ended up taking my bread home and toasting it for breakfast the next day. Ravil has a great new job supervising the machines that count the mail. He has to work 24 hours, then has 3 days off. It’s a great schedule for him.
So we had a nice, relaxing afternoon and then Sonia and I walked up to the concert hall. We find our seats and Sonia sees here Spanish-speaking friends and says hello. The announcer comes out and announces.....a Madrigal group playing medieval instruments! Hmmmm, not what we bought tickets for. We debate whether we are in the right concert hall. We seem to be, because they took our tickets. Ok, let’s wait this one out. An hour and a half goes by and all me hear is Madrigal singing. This is not  what Flamenco is supposed to be, I thought. The performance was actually very good. It was a talented group of musicians. But not Flamenco.
So after 1.5 hours the lights go on. Then the announce thanks the group. Well, it looks like that’s over. So we go to the coat check and get our stuff. We are about to leave when we run into one of Sonia’s friends again and she says, wait, wait, the second half will be Flamenco. It turns out this concert series is part of some international festival and they mixed all sorts of music together in one show. Show, taking our coats with us, we went in for the second half and it was really, truly Flamenco. It was very good. There was a guitarist, a percussionist and a female dancer. And interestingly enough, the dancer was a woman from Moscow who had gone to to Spain just to learn Flamenco dancing. She was very, very good.
Boy, was I glad we went back for the second half. I glad we FOUND OUT there was a second half. We walked to the subway and still had time to run into the grocery store before it closed when we got to our stop.
So it was a very musical weekend.