Fact #1: I am a country girl through and through. I constantly dream of me and the hubs moving out of London to a cottage in the countryside with a vegetable patch and chickens, and a big farmhouse table in the kitchen. HOWEVER if there ever was a year to be living in London 2012 is that year. We've had the jubilee celebrations which were awesome, and now we have the Olympics.
Lots of Londoners (including myself) were very grumpy about them beforehand mainly because of potential traveling issues, but it all seems to have gone very smoothly. In fact central London appears to be eerily quiet as apparently too many people listened to the warnings to stay out of London to avoid the crowds!Listening to the Radio this morning as well lots of Londoners were phoning in stating how the amazing opening ceremony had changed their opinion about the Olympics.
Anticipating the ceremony would be spectacular we had a party on Friday night to celebrate and watch the ceremony together. Despite my usual fretting (E.g. How were we going to fit over 15 people in a flat which feels full with 2 people usually?) we had such a lovely evening. I decorated the flat in red, white and blue and Union Jack bunting, and cooked an international feast including Vodka Jelly (Russia), Eton Mess (England), fried plantain (Jamaica) and Nigella Lawson's take on an American dish of Ham cooked in Coca Cola which is actually incredible despite my reservations. All these feastly delights were accompanied by their country of origin's flags.
People crammed themselves into our flat and we even had a fly past from the Red Arrows on their way to East London (which I specially arranged of course....). Then we spent the evening round the telly cheering the Queen and Rowan Atkinson, and commenting on jive dancing nurses, and just generally enjoying it.
However the next evening I was super lucky to have been put on a school trip to take some students to see the Artistic Gymnastics (wehoo!). It was brilliant! Since being little and watching the Olympics the one sport I always wanted to see at an Olympics live was gymnastics and it exceeded my expectations. The fact that people can train their bodies to do such incredible moves still astounds me. We were really high up so I wasn't able to get amazing shots on my camera but it didn't matter as by being high up we could clearly see everything that was going on.
Since then I have literally been on the edge of my seat watching some of the events- particularly the men's team gymnastics final where for a fleeting moment we actually got silver before a score was contested. I was not shouting at the TV at this point in a rage as that would make me a mad woman....(does fingers crossed make it ok to fib?).
Anyway what have you been watching on the Olympics?
Toodles for now.
Becky.
