Olympics!

When we arrived in London yesterday, we were both surprised at how busy it was compared to when we left last week. Today, we experienced the Olympics! Safe to say it's thrown the city into chaos, whilst buses and trains are busy, the roads are gridlocked thanks to the Olympic Lane, a separate lane dedicated in each street solely for use by athletes, foreign dignitaries and controversially here it's also reserved for the sponsors. The funny thing is that the London MP's have been told to take the tube and to leave their chauffer cars at home! This lane in many cases takes the roads down to one lane and London isn't coping too well with that! We haven't met a cab driver yet who is happy with the situation.

Having said all of this we took public transport to Horse Guards Parade today and we got seats on the train there and back and the atmosphere was happy all around. The city is teeming with volunteer helpers absolutely everywhere, policemen are all getting their pictures taken with tourists and there is the feeling of a party in the air.

We got to the venue with heaps of time and it was amazing to see all the people in what would normally be a busy street. The crowds and queues were very well organised and we were quickly through the security checks. I was pleased to see that the food wasn't over the top in price, we had fish and chips on the grass sitting in the sun and it was quite lovely!

We made our way to our seats and understandably I suppose, the entire stadium was made of scaffolding. Whilst it is clearly safe it seemed very odd to be climbing to great heights on walkways on top of scaffolding!

We were blessed with glorious sunshine all afternoon as we watched four games of beach volleyball - two mens and two womens teams. The crowd was fair in their support of each team until the second mens game, Great Britain vs Canada. Despite huge crowd support (inlcuding the kid behind us saying "come on Jesus!" who I'm quite sure was not playing!! Team GB as they're called here lost but the crowd was 100% behind them all the way! The last womens game was a great one with first ranked Brazil vs 55th ranked Mauritius! Mauritius only brought 11 athletes to the games and they were self-funded. This was about all the crowd needed to here to get right behind the Mauritian team. Again, despite crowd support they were slaughtered 5/21 and 10/21.

The British have put a great deal of thought into these games, they had a group of bikini clad dancers out between sets, games and sometimes during timeouts to keep the crowd amused. They also played Benny Hill music when the 'rakers' came out to rake the sand back in place. Some enterprising people from the crowd did the Benny Hill chase around the stadium as the music was on! There was the obligatory Borat in a lime green mankini but in deference to the British weather (or his modesty) he wore Y fronts underneath! A look to remember for sure! Sarah even saw David Cameron, the British PM whilst she was queing for drinks!

Our first taste of Olympic fever was great and we can't wait to see if the Synchronised Swimming has just as good an atmosphere. We're also looking forward to checking out Olympic Park.