November!!!!!

your monthly late post is here! and this time it's for a very special month, by far my favorite month of 2023 (we still have to wait until December though, in this house we play fair and square hahah) hello lads and lasses, hoping all is well wherever you are!

oh boy where do i even start! so November is my bday month, CoIdpIay Jakarta month, and CoIdpIay's first Asia/Oceania leg of Music of the Spheres world tour!!! this post is gonna be yet another long one because so many exciting things happened and i want to retell every juicy detail of them!

first of all, a little heads up, for laying low purposes i'll be censoring a few words (lowercase L changed to uppercase i, etc) so rest assured my keyboard is OK! second of all, if you saw my instagram stories or read my tweets you guys must be wondering why all of a sudden i got to see CoIdpIay in Jakarta when i clearly said i lost the ticketing war and that i will never buy from scalpers?

this is where one of the greatest adventure of my lifetime started. that seemingly contradictive event is solved by a very unexpected turn as a causal effect of something i did without much thinking a long time ago: i signed up for Love Button (LB) voIunteering project! a little bit background story, CoIdpIay have been partnering with a lot of non-government organizations working for environment, social justice, and humanity, where LB is one of them. every single concert show the band will bring along these NGOs to create impact at the cities they visited. the NGOs will then open a call for volunteers asking locals to join in. when CoIdpIay Jakarta was announced around May, even after i knew i can't see the band, i only thought that at least i get to join an activity that is endorsed by the band, brings positivity, and provides help. so i quickly signed up for LB, and as time flew by i kinda forgot about it.

around mid October aka 1,5 months before CoIdpIay Jakarta, i got an email from LB's head coordinator asking for confirmation from the people who've signed up whether they're still interested to volunteer, there were 27 people contacted. i remember immediately replying with a "yes please!!!" because i was just so excited 😂 then a week later another email from LB HQ again asking for confirmation from the ones who are still interested whether we have any idea which Indonesian NGOs LB can work with and would we be able to make it to spare some time for voIunteering project, this time only 19 people were contacted. then at last, around a month before CoIdpIay Jakarta, LB HQ made a WhatsApp group for the remaining 10 people. i remember thinking, "oh, only ten people can make it," which is understandable because usually the volunteering project will be held on d-1/d-day of the CoIdpIay show, where Jakarta's will be on a weekday.

here's when things get a whole lot more interesting! after all ten of us joined the group, LB HQ dropped the surprise: all of us will get a CoIdpIay Jakarta ticket, free of charge, courtesy of the band!!!!!

i remember receiving the news on a Friday during a class (yes i played with my phone during class do not imitate) and wanting to scream and jump and laugh but i couldn't because i was on a Zoom meeting with my cam on 😂 i never expected this to happen and never even dared to imagine this stroke of luck will ever come to me 🥺 until this very second as i type this i still can't fathom how when it's yours it will be yours no matter what. i mean: i remember feeling so dejected after not being able to secure any ticket on three different occasions (BCA presale, general sale, Infinity tickets sale) and knowing so many scalpers and scammers are out there waiting to prey on me, yet! i still get the ticket, there's a way for me to see the band at my home stadium, from a very unexpected source, and without spending any money!? i was over the moon, rejoicing over the news with a coldplay twitter friend who also got selected as one of the volunteers. i couldn't really talk about it since i want to keep it a secret because at that time i didn't exactly have ticket already, so i didn't want to jinx it.

anyways, LB HQ announced the volunteering project will take place d-1 CoIdplay Jakarta. here was when i encountered the first problem: during CoIdplay Jakarta week, i also had a orthodontic seminar happening (LB volunteer on Nov 14, CoIdplay Jakarta on Nov 15 while the seminar was on Nov 14-16) and at first i was heartbroken because initially

(edit: 31/12/2023 - i’m crying i actually have this Nov post almost finished in drafts BUT THEN BAM more uni assignments i procrastinated even more 🥲 so now i’m gonna finish this post lol)

because initially i thought i couldn’t make it given that i have to attend the Jakarta Orthodontist Meeting seminars, but biidznillah it was actually the one thing that made it possible for me to clear my schedule in a way that i don’t have mandatory classes and i can just slip away unnoticed! this is again, one of those times Allah helped me in ways i never expected and He came from unexplainable twists…

so yes, the days leading to Love Button volunteering day and coldplay Jakarta were charged with adrenaline, literally the best kind of wait i’ve ever experienced haha. i remember when November 14th finally came, i was sooo relieved and nervous at the same time i had to force myself to go to sleep the night before and woke up super early. my plan was: the volunteer work was from 7-9 AM and then i’d go straight to Kuningan where the seminar was held. important note is that the seminar started at 8.30 AM so i was late for almost 1.5 hours (i volunteered at Lapangan Banteng Park at Central Jakarta and the seminar was at South Jakarta 🥲) but yeah! the rush to be quick while also enjoying it was so fun! volunteer work was trash collecting with friends from Trash Hero Jakarta and though it was scorching hot i got to finally meet the rest of Love Button vols (that now are my very great friends, we’re seeing each other again for Coldplay Singapore haha) also! Nov 14th night i went to ColdplayXtra’s fan meetup and met even more coldplay friends!!! we had singalongs while having dinner and sharing stories, i could feel the way our love for the band brings us together, it was instant friendship bond made one after another we conversed like we were longtime besties.

next day comes, the main event of the month: coldplay Jakarta d-day!!! oh my god. when i tell you i can’t even describe how magical that day was, please believe me i feel like right now it’s kinda pointless trying to write it down because the range of emotions i feel that night was so diverse and no word can bring it justice 🥹 but i’ll start from the morning, i had to come to the seminar first because i had to scan my barcode for my attendance record, then at 12.30 PM after i ate lunch & did my prayers i went to Fairmont Hotel to exchange my ticket (the tickets for Love Button vols are different than the rest, because we got special seated VIP ones with ‘guest of the artist’ tagged for us!!! 🤩) then after that we crossed over to Gelora Bung Karno stadium complex.

apparently our tickets also have different instructions where we were to enter the stadium complex from a different/sterile gate, so we didn’t queue at all 🥹 got our lightning wristbands and then we took photos, literally hunting for any photobox or photo ops around the complex because we didn’t need to queue to go inside the stadium (since our tickets are seated ones) to pass time. dozens of photos collected, then we sat down and ate our meals as we wait until gates open time. another surprise came: Coldplay reposted Love Button’s instagram post!!! another once-in-a-lifetime bucket list checked: having our faces broadcasted to almost 24M of coldplay’s instagram followers 😂

around 6 PM we were finally allowed to enter the stadium and my oh my. GBK is HUGEEE! i have a very bad depth/distance perception at first i was like, oh this stadium is not that big. but when i finally had a fixed point of reference (it was the pillars above my head lol) i realized just how spacious and gigantic it is! i mean, the capacity is 85,000 people!!! woah and seeing the place getting filled slowly was quite a view. we had Rahmania Astrini as our opener and she was great! her songs are nice and her voice is A+, i suggest checking her out!

9 PM finally arrived and i remember saying to kak Jess how buzzing with surmounting energy i was as we all held our breath for the long awaited opening track signifying the band’s entrance: John William’s E.T’s theme, the Flying Theme!!! as a film score enthusiast i was this close to combust up in flames, two of my favorite things in one go, my heart can only take so much 🥹🥹🥹

then Higher Power started playing, and it began, the show i had been waiting for 9 years… i remember feeling like i ascended to cloud nine, as the stadium lit up with colors and all i could do was sing as loud as my vocal cord allowed me to, jumped up and down in the most literal way because i couldn’t stop moving around to the beat and the rhythm, and just overall trying to gulp down taking in

(edit #3, 23/01/2024: lol i am sorry my assignments were really holding me from finishing the post but! here i am d-3 to my coldplay Singapore trip, resuming the story!)

i don't think i can put into words what i felt during the show, it was simply magical. everything and everyone was so fully energy charged. and i'm so glad i saw the band with nine other Love Button volunteers because they were in the same brain wavelength/frequency as me so it goes without saying it was super duper fun enjoying whatever the band gave us during the show 🥺 best day ever, best early birthday present ever. the friends i met and found along the way are some of the best people i've ever had the precious chance to come across. these memories are to last for a very long time. so huge thank you for @coldplay no words could ever express my gratitude enough 💙

then along came my birthday, and my classmates held a mini celebration for me, though hilariously they admitted it was almost a disaster because they weren't sure the exact date - i'm the walking reminder of the class so it was impossible to ask the bday person what's their bday 😭😂

all in all, November's adventures are full of fun! the fact that the most seemingly impossible things to happen still found its way to happen is mindblowing. it cemented even deeper into my psyche that to trust Allah is to have the best plan ever. i could literally meticulously plan from A to Z but when He decided upon another, that's my path. even until today i still can't believe against all odds, with many conflicting schedules, tight spots, i still made it. with my faith in me, i will have not to worry. this actually soothes my overthinking self better than anything! haha

life is good, alhamdulillah. see you in the December post that i'm also currently writing (lol!) and also in January post that i'll write after i'm back from Singapore, from yet another adventure of a lifetime! 😉