Eat. All Day. We Love.: January 2013

Hi there! So, despite the fact that we’ve been back home in Aus for almost 4 months now, and the fact that we haven’t posted an update on here for even longer, we’ve still thought ‘What the heck, why not fill in the gaps of our travels so that we can have a complete record of them!?’. So here we are, about to unravel the last few tales of our wow-so-much-fun trip overseas. Strap yourselves in.

When we left you last we were in sunny and bicycle-ful France, satiated with delicious cheeses, crusty baguettes and ever-so-cheap-but-hugely-tasty wine. Our next destination was London, the city of all things grand, royal, and in this instance, Olympic! Thus the grandeur of London was temporarily lost on us as we were about to embark on a a whirlwind, 24-hour trip to this city to watch an Olympic event in person – Day 1 of the men's artistic gymnastics to be precise. Needless to say we were hugely excited about this next part of our adventure, with Jay in particular - being the sports fanatic that he is - almost bursting out of his skin with anticipation. Again, this initial trip to London would be over and done with in just over 24 hours, as we were making our way back to mainlaind Europe the following evening, so we were ready to make the most out of our short detour to the UK.

Our first glimpse of Olympics fever in London

Our Olympics tickets had been mailed to our friends Amy and Charlie’s place, and we were eager to pick them up from there ready for the next day’s event. Or at least that was the plan. The problem, we soon found out, was that no one had actually checked the contents of this said envelope when it had first arrived at their place. Therefore we were quite shocked when we arrived at Amy and Charlie's (via the incredible English Channel train from Paris to London), opened the envelope, and saw that it was not our highly anticipated Olympics tickets which made up the contents, but rather Jay’s Liverpool membership he had ordered a few weeks earlier (which, though not discussed at the time, was also an important parcel he had been waiting on).

This pup sums up how we felt after opening the envelope

This of course meant that our highly anticipated tickets had not arrived, and since our event was scheduled to begin in less than 15 hours’ time, we were in a spot of bother. And since we had basically made the voyage to London just to see this event, coupled with all of the money we had invested to make this dream a reality, we felt extremely shattered and demoralised. Nevertheless, we had another Olympics-related event to get to that night – the Opening Ceremony Concert Celebration in Hyde Park – so after making a few futile calls to various Olympic ticket hotlines (where we were told we couldn’t be helped), we left Amy & Charlie’s to dance the night away and celebrate the start of the Olympics together with the lovely Kate Devine and Erin Fairlie in Hyde Park.

Shakin' our thang in Hyde Park with Duran Duran, giant ciders, and some rain - a truly British experience!

Despite the very fun night we had out in Hyde Park (complete with airforce jets flying over at precisely 8:12pm [the year of the Olympics - WOW] with red, blue and white smoke shooting out the back of them in an impressive display of patriotism), we still couldn’t help but feel hugely downhearted. We had even been tempted to go door-knocking at Amy’s block of flats (about 30 homes in all), politely asking her neighbors if anyone had mistakenly taken our precious Olympics tickets. Instead, we ended up agreeing to wake up a bit earlier the next day to check if our tickets had accidentally been delivered to the local post-office. However Jay felt so glum that he decided to turn the alarm off without telling me so that we could have a bit of a sleep-in after our big night out. Unfortunately that plan didn’t work as my trusty body-clock woke me up promptly at 9am (2 hours before our event was to start), and not wanting to give up all hope of finding our tickets just yet, I rallied for us to check out the local post office.

Thinking that we would be back within the hour (a cycling event was being held on the streets outside which we were going to watch), we simply popped some clothes on, grabbed our camera in case anything exciting were to happen at the cycling, and went to the post office with Amy and Charlie in tow to check if our tickets were there. I should reiterate that we hadn’t eaten breakfast, hadn’t brushed our teeth, hadn’t showered, and hence looked rather derelict and scruffy - we were definitely looking forward to getting clean and nourished back at Amy's home asap.

Once at the post office, the man working there quickly informed us that our parcel wasn’t there, but that we could try ring the one a few blocks away to see if they had been delivered there. After begging him to allow us to use his business phone to call the other post office, he finally, albeit reluctantly, gave in, and passed it over. Still feeling dispirited by the entire situation, Jay could not believe his ears when the person on the other end said that yes, our parcel was in fact at their post office, so after thanking the current gentleman profusely for his assistance, we properly began our wild goose chase for the tickets. It was now 10am, an hour away from our event which was being held on the other side of the city.

This is how the next hour and a bit panned out:

10.05am: arrived at post office huffing and puffing after running a few blocks to get there STAT. Explained what we were after.

10.10am: after a lot of paper rustling and pile-rearranging, the kind old gentleman at the post office found THE HIGHLY ANTICIPATED ENVELOPE. To be honest, I was slightly nervous that this would be a repeat of what had happened 7 hours earlier with the Liverpool envelope, but the Olympics emblem on the front reassured me. And the opened contents confirmed this, our tickets were there - hoorah!!

Eureka!!

10.12am: We said goodbye to Amy & Charlie and rushed off to make our way to Greenwich. For those of you playing at home, that’s like travelling from North Melbourne Station to Glen Waverley, so there was a huge possibility that we wouldn’t be able to make it to the event in time. Coupled with the fact that the streets were all blocked off due to the cycling event taking place, making a brisk run to the nearest Underground was more challenging than normal. Together with the fact that we had no idea where we were going – luckily we were pointed in the correct direction by friendly locals and we eventually made it to the tube station.

10.20am: Another friendly local cum train inspector explained how to get to Greenwich. Just to give you an appreciation of where we had to get to, here is a tube map for your reference:

10.45am: We arrived at the venue in record time, expecting a huge hold up with queues of people waiting for their bags to be checked. In reality we were led straight through (we had no bags with us), and decided that with 15 minutes to spare we may as well have some breakfast to celebrate our achievements and nourish our bodies. With no breakfast-friendly venues around, we agreed that Mexican burritos would do! The said burritos were ordered.

11.00am: 15 mintues later we were still waiting for said burrtios. Meanwhile the event had already started! This was rather outrageous, particularly as the number of people who were working at the stall (at least 10) far outweighed the number of people who had ordered burritos (at maximum 4). Burritos don’t normally take this long to cook, so this was truly was quite outrageous, but given the fairly outrageous past 13 hours we had just had, we were just pleased to finally have them in our hands when they were ready. And off we went to enjoy the next couple of hours of gymnastics!