OLYMPICS 2012

At 5am Sunday morning, whilst everyone else was sleeping, I was driving myself and Carwen down to Cardiff to catch the 7:50am bus to the Olympic Park in London. The bus ride took us about 4 and half hours as we had to make stops in Newport, Bristol, Swindon and Reading. The time went by quite fast though as I slept, listened to music and watched Woody Allen's 'Annie Hall' also a game or two of Scrabble happened! From the moment we arrived in the park all the games makers (the Olympic volunteers) were so welcoming and approachable. They would have a chat with you about what you were going to watch etc, I thought that was so cool and it's something people will remember from the London Olympics - that everyone was so polite! The weather was soooo hot around midday that we had to go in to the Olympic Mega store to by some clothes to change in to (; !  Everything I wanted was sold out or were only available in XXL or something silly like that. I ended up buying a GB cycling style top which I actually really liked so everything turned out fine!

We grabbed some lunch and then headed in to Park live. This is where thousands of people congregate around a big screen to watch olympic events. The atmosphere here was great as everyone had there union flags waving and cheering as we watched Andy Murray storm his way past Federer to win the Gold medal at Wimbledon! As well as seeing Murray win gold we also saw Jamie Cullum the awesome jazz musician, pianist and the husband of Sophie Dahl. Not only did we see him but we could touch him he was so close to us! Wawi! He's so short though, but he looked so cool!

(Jamie Cullum!)

After watching some tennis and then some Velodrome action we decided to leave park live and we went for a little walk around the park and passed the basketball arena, water polo, hockey, aquatics arena, copper box (where we later went to watch handball), olympic stadium and my favourite arena of all - the Velodrome! On our little walk we grabbed some noodles to eat before we headed in to watch the event we had come down for - Handball.

Before Sunday I had never seen a live game of handball but I was aware of its popularity in Mainland Europe and Scandinavia. When I was in Sweden last year handball was on TV, for what seemed like, all the time! We entered the Copper Box, or as it is also known as, The Box That Rocks, because of its lively atmosphere which is created through all the music and dancing that goes on between play! I actually really enjoyed watching the sport, they have to be incredibly tough and fit to run back and forth on the pitch and fall flat on there faces almost every time they throw for goal! The first match we watched was Norway V France, the second was Denmark V France. Spain and France both took the wins. The 100m sprint final was on during the second match so I took my ipad out to watch the event and in about 10 seconds there were at least 10/15 people around me asking if they too could watch Bolt try to retain his olympic title! It's fare to say that everyone was pleased that Bolt won the race, as they all started to clap once the race was over!

The handball finished at around 22:45 and whilst on the way to the Stratford Tube we saw Gabby Logan in the BBC studios presenting Olympics tonight! We didn't have to que for the tube at all and made it to Paddington to catch our 1am train back to Cardiff with plenty of time to spare. We arrived in Cardiff at around 4am after a few delays due to engineering work on the railway! We took a taxi back to our car and I drove the 2 hours home. Upon arriving home I jumped in bed and slept after a very exciting and memorable 26 hours!