Hello!
First things first, I want to keep to the pledge of #save the surprise, so I will not be showing too many photos of the Olympic opening ceremony YET, but sufficed to say I had an AMAZING time watching the dress rehearsal yesterday. Here I also need to say a big thanks to CBC for letting me go and a sorry for being a big grump over sitting in a hot pub beforehand.
So, after meeting CBC and Monkeygirl beforehand, MG and I bid goodbye to CBC for the timebeing and found ourselves in a fairly swift queue into the Olympic park. We had to submit to airport style security in a large marquee. Luckily, we had no hidden weapons so we slid through fairly quickly.
We were in!
A large amount of people milled around familiarising themselves with their surroundings. All sorts of helpful stewards and Olympic volunteers were there at every corner, being friendly, supportive, encouraging and generally ensuring everyone was having a nice time!
We saw The Orbit, the sort of modern art industrial helterskelter type contraption which was interesting, though would have been fun to be able to slide down it!
The lovely thing about the grounds was that wild flowers had been planted in really pretty, dense beds, all around the stadium, canals, etc. They were really charming. The type of scenes that a fashion-blogger would love to mill around in, looking pretty in a floral dress, clutching a ballooon (not me!).
Monkeygirl grabbed some fish and chips from a stall, very sensibly early as the queues were really long later on. We met CBC and found some incredibly luscious, long, soft grass to sit on (looked like a public school boy's hair on a grand scale; that sort of lovely mop! MG's description!).
CBC had a yearning to go into one of the multistorey Macdonalds, pictured below, to see if they were superior to the normal type, but they weren't yet open!
CBC had to go and get into his costume so after lying in the grass some more, chatting, MG and I wandered around the Olympic park, eating ice-creams. We found the Velodrome, Basketball court, Aquatics-centre etc. We also saw lots of turf and other interesting items cordoned off for the Opening ceremony.
MG and I got most excited when we saw this rainbow astroturf and had one or two fun races where we were each assigned a colour and had to get from one lampost to another before the other. It was all good until I trod on someone's toe who had inconsiderately stood on my pink spot!
At 7.10ish, MG and I made our way into the Stadium. Nothing could have prepared me for how huge it was and how amazing it looked!
We had really good seats, on the upper tier, but only 3 rows from the front, fairly ideally situated for CBC's drumming position.
There was such an excited vibe- everyone not believing their luck that they were here to see something so historic and amazing!
Our eyes greedily drank in all the details of the set whilst waiting. I didn't need my book, there was so much to think about. One or two funny moments ensued. One was a town-crier ringing his bell and marking the time.
I managed to capture him in the picture below. He's directly below the pink t-shirted person leaning over! I don't know if he was part of the atmosphere or he just fancied standing out.
Some bright spark managed to get a Mexican wave started, which managed to get round the entire upper tier! The last time I managed to do a Mexican-wave with this many people was around 18 years ago, aged 13 when we went to watch Aida at the Amphitheatre in Verona with my Youth orchestra!
As time went on, the natural set was supplemented by actors in role taking position on the field. This part of the show will not be shown on TV, as it is largely setting the scene. It began at 20:12
One of the funniest moments was when one of the 4-legged members of the cast came on and right on queue, performed a natural act of nature! This was greeted by a large roar of laughter and appreciative round of applause (as was the person who came and cleared it up 10 minutes later).
Just before it started, MG and I opened an envelope entitled 'Top secret Olympics documents' prepared by CBC to show us where he would be and at what time he would be doing things. He'd drawn a replica of the stadium and marked where we were, where he'd be. In addition, he gave us a whole host of 'Where's Wally?' style items to look out for including: a large bell, a tree, men used as counterweights, a scarecrow...
Lots of elements of the opening ceremony were not shown as they want to save some surprises till Friday. So all sorts of important roles were taken by random people, the comperes, someone stood in for the Queen, the LSO were replaced by LSO on track players, instrument-playig-children from boroughs around London (how cool is that, they got to play in the Olympics rehearsal!) some of the pyrotechnics and other elements will be happening on Friday.
We managed to spot CBC, he was right at the back of the drummers to the right of the mound.
There was audience participation! Each of us had a detachable LED light piece which made all sorts of amazing light effects which they got us to do a sequence to. The shot below shows you another element of audience participation...
For anyone who is feeling Bah-humbug over the Olympics, I urge you to watch the ceremony on Friday night. It is so so so so clever! Many of the people taking part are volunteers and they have worked so so hard to make this an amazing performance. CBC has given up so many weekends and evening to rehearse and there are 10,000 people who have done the same. The athletes too, and most importantly, it's all about them and their hardwork, so watch if you can! There are so many delightful things to look out for, so many ingenious ideas and I was giggling like a delighted school girl! I felt ashamed of myself for thinking that I wasn't that interested. It was immense!
I'm not giving any shots because I do want to help save the surprise, I hope those I have shown don't give away anything much but I hope it encourages you to watch, to give an idea of how breathtaking it is going to be!!
At 10:15, we were asked to leave, as they rehearsed the flag parade. You can see those little dots to the right at the edge of the field. Those are CBC and his fellow drummers in their marshalling costumes getting ready to rehearse as we left.
As we left, the park was lit up. We followed the hoards going towards Stratford station. Luckily for me, most people seemed to want the Central line or Jubilee towards London so I managed to go straight to my platform and get a train east-bound (albeit very crowded) swiftly. If you are going to it, I suggest getting the Greater Anglia service towards Liverpool street rather than Central or Jubilee, then you can change there. Head for the Greater anglia route and then you might get there a little quicker!
I'm quite sad that I am going to be incommunicado for 10 days from tomorrow morning as I'm quite psyched up by the Olympics now and wish I could watch the Opening ceremony
