Olympic Holiday- Day 2

On day two of our holiday it was time to go and see our first Olympic event.  The beach volleyball tickets advised that we arrive at the venue 90 minutes before the start time.  Seeing as the start time was 9am I refused to believe that we needed to be there from half 7.  There had been warnings in the news of airport style security causing gigantic queue, which, I could well believe for the Olympic Stadium but not for the Beach Volleyball.  So we rocked up at 8am and by 10 past we’d already got inside the venue. 

The arena itself was quite impressive.  I’m not sure I’d thought it would be quite so big.  From the outside it looked like a huge amount of scaffolding however once we got to the section we were sitting in it, it seemed huge. We sat ourselves down in row 37 as was indicated on our tickets. I’d been afraid that the English weather would let us down once again, however, this time it surprised me. I was even starting to think we should have bought some sun-cream!

Panoramic View of the Stadium

As more people arrived to fill up the seats near us it seemed there was some sort of dispute over the row numbering.  This didn’t seem too much of problem though and people seemed to be sorting it out amongst themselves….. until the over keen volunteer showed up.  She was on a mission to make sure everyone was in the correct seat.  Unfortunately it seemed that we were all sat in the row behind the one we should have been in.  At first she wanted to get us all out and then resit us down, however, there would have been nowhere for us to stand whilst she did this so she seemed to give up.  But then, she came back for a second attempt.  She got everyone to clamber over the seats in front and so by halfway through we were actually in the right seats.

We were up near the back in the cheaper seats that were all full.  It was disappointing to see that a lot of the more expensive seats remained empty.  However with my long zoom lens I still managed to get some good photos of the action…

Germany in action

In the afternoon we went to the Natural History Museum as Lea has a fascination with dinosaurs.  We spent a good few hours there looking round all the exhibits.

I only found out a couple of months ago that Lea has some sort of morbid fear of whales, due to their size.  I had to practically drag her into the part where there was a life size model of a whale.

The big scary whale!

That evening we met up with one of my old school friends who has recently moved to London.  She suggested that we go for a curry on Brick Lane.  We got to the first restaurant on the strip and were talked into the door by the owner.  The restaurant was fairly busy and they had a banner up saying they had won some award.  He also offered us a free bottle of wine which was enough to win us over!  The food was extremely nice, I had some sort of selection dish-

My Brick Lane Curry

However, if you ever go to Brick Lane my advice to you would be-it certainly is the place to go if you're in London and you fancy a curry but shop around and don't get sucked in by the first restaurant.  It seems every single place has a banner up saying they've won some prestigious award.  I was surprised we didn't happen upon a banner printing shop because they would be doing a roaring trade!   

Alex x