Greetings from Roma, Italia! This will be the last blog
entry written from foreign soil… how crazy is that??? My goodness, 13 ½ months
has gone by quite quickly. I’m currently on day 6 in Rome, my last full day
here. I’ve already done all of the tourist sights that I wanted to tackle, so I
thought I’d use day 6 to write the blog and leisurely pack before heading out
later on for one last night out on the town. So let’s start the European recap,
shall we? WARNING, however: this might be a long one…
I arrived in London via Abu Dhabi after about 24 hours of
flying. The flight from Sydney to Abu Dhabi was 14 hours, and then I had just
enough time to get to the adjacent terminal in Abu Dhabi for the 7 hour flight
to Heathrow. I enjoyed my brief time at the Abu Dhabi airport though. It was
heaps of fun trying to read all the Arabic. After the 14-hour flight, the 2nd
one seemed like a drop in the bucket. A few dozen pages of journal writing and
we were in London. Suzy met me at the airport, and despite my fears about
landing in London on the day of the Opening Ceremonies, our tube carriage
wasn’t exactly full:
That’s me swinging like a monkey in the densely populated
train.
The rest of the day was a bit of a blur. Went to get a UK
sim card, took a nap, and attempted to watch the Opening Ceremonies, but we
were both exhausted and didn’t quite make it till the end. I happily collapsed
into my bed that night – One of Suzy’s roommates was away for my first 3 nights,
and the girl was nice enough to loan me her bed. It was SO nice being able to
curl up in a real bed when I was exhausted from jet lag. What a difference in
reception from the last time I got off a long-haul international flight! When I
landed in Sydney in July of last year, I was alone, spent the night in a
hostel, and ate a bad, overpriced sandwich from 7 eleven before passing out.
This time I had a wonderful friend meet me at the airport, a comfy bed, a couch
with a tv and a home cooked meal. A much nicer reception!
The next day Suzy and I tackled some tourist activities. We
went on a duck tour and had lunch at a real, old-school type British pub. Here
I am in front of Tower Bridge, all decked out for the Games!
Wandered around town a bit, and then later on in the
afternoon we headed for the CoSport will-call office so that I could pick up my
tickets for the next day’s competition!
That’s where the drama started.
Let me start off with a bit of background information. First
off, CoSport is the official ticket
distributor for the Olympic Games for like 10 different countries: The United
States, Canada, Australia, Norway, Austria and a few others. So basically, if
you live in one of those 10 countries and you wanted official, non-scalped
tickets, then CoSport was the only option. The lottery for obtaining Olympic
tickets was a long, arduous process that started at the very beginning of 2011.
I put it bids for all of the women’s gymnastics events, which tallied about
$5000 worth of tickets. I knew I wouldn’t get all of that, but I was hoping for
at least some. I was awarded with $300 worth, which was disappointing. I wasn’t
going to bother going, but then I met Suzy in New Zealand last December, who
was nice enough to offer up her couch for accommodation, and the rest is
history.
Women’s gymnastics is divided into several days of
competition. The first day is the long one. It’s the preliminary session. No
medals are awarded, and every gymnast who qualifies for the Olympic Games gets
to go. It’s a super long day, starting at 9:30 am and finishing about 12 hours
later. Two days later the top 8 teams from the prelims compete for the medals
in the team finals. Two days after that, the top 24 girls who competed all 4
apparatuses in the prelim session compete for the individual all-around title,
which is the highest individual award you can achieve in gymnastics. You become
the queen of the sport. There’s nothing higher than winning the gold in the
all-around. A couple of days after that, the individual event finals start. The
top 8 girls on each apparatus from the preliminary session compete for medals
on that specific event. So the preliminary day of competing, while essentially
a weed-out process, is super important. You goof up there, and forget about the
rest of it. Most gymnasts from the weaker countries don’t see any competition
past that first day.
As I said, the prelim session is about 12 hours long, since
everyone competes. In terms of the spectators, they split up the day into 3
ticketing sessions. There was a morning session that went from about 9:30 am
until noon, and evening session that went from 8 pm until 9:30, and a super
long mid-day session that filled up most of the middle of the day. I got
tickets for 2 of the 3 prelim sessions, although unfortunately I got the short
evening one and the slightly longer morning one. But hey, I was still going to
the Olympics! I wish I had kept the email that CoSport sent out when they
released who was awarded tickets. Women’s gymnastics, although far from a
mainstream sport in non-Olympic years, is one of the marquee events of the
Games. Everyone wants to go, and us loyal fans get a bit shafted in having to
compete for tickets with people who can’t tell a pommel horse from a balance
beam. Something like less than 1% of people in the United States who applied
for gymnastics tickets for the medal finals were awarded with seats, and the
data for the prelim sessions was only slightly less depressing. So really, I
was extremely lucky to have gotten anything at all.
The line to pick up the tickets at the will-call office,
which was a makeshift office set up at a university just outside the city
center, was about a half hour long. When it was finally my turn, there was a
bit of trouble locating my tickets at first. I hadn’t printed out the confirmation
form since I didn’t have a printer, and there was some information they were
looking for that I didn’t have on me. Luckily I was able to pull up the pdf
file on Suzy’s smartphone. Those things really do some in handy sometimes! I
wasn’t surprised that there was confusion in locating my tickets. I had
originally asked for them to be shipped, since you had to select the option
back when you applied for the tickets. I did all that long before I had even
made the choice to go to Australia. Once I firmed up plans to fly to London
from Sydney to go to the Games, I asked them to make an exception for me and
cancel the shipping. I explained that shipping them to New York in early July
was going to cause problems… They agreed, but I figured that because of the
change in plans perhaps the tickets had ended up in the wrong spot or
something.
Little progress was being made. Suzy and I stood at the long
table, while the girl who was unfortunate enough to have been the free counter
when I was next in line disappeared for ages behind the closed doors.
Eventually they put us in the auditorium that was filled with other people
whose tickets they were having trouble locating…
It was sort of like the auditorium of despair. Based on the
snippets of conversations we heard between potential Olympic spectators and
CoSport employees, there were a lot of unhappy people. The girl working with me
was convinced that the tickets were accidentally shipped, despite my request to
have them picked up instead. I knew that couldn’t be true since I would have
received an automated tracking email from Fedex if they had mistakenly gone
out, and my Dad is pretty on top of the mail. If Olympic tickets randomly
popped up in Queens, I would have been informed. So we sat for ages, passing
the time by playing scrabble on Suzy’s phone while the girl searched the black
hole of the CoSport office for my missing tickets. I eventually got up to go to
the bathroom, since I figured that as soon as I left someone would come out
with an answer. Sure enough, when I returned to the auditorium of broken
dreams, there was a CoSport employee, a different one from whom I had been
dealing with over the past hour and a half, sitting in front of Suzy. The
employee looked dejected, and was holding one ticket in her hand. I sat down, curious
as to what the story was.
At first I misunderstood what the girl was telling me. She
slowly explained that my tickets were
unavailable, but here was a different ticket to the evening prelim session,
and they would refund me the cost of the morning session, along with the price
difference for the evening session, since this new ticket was in a higher
section and therefore cheaper. I was confused and irritated. How can you tell
me I’ve been awarded tickets and charge me for them, if I really never had them??? How can you tell customers they’ve
got certain tickets if it wasn’t true? I made plans to come to London, I said
to her, based on the fact that I had 2 events with semi-decent seats. Then it
was clarified. I was awarded
those original $300 worth of tickets. They were mine indeed. But CoSport lost
them.
That was all they could say to me. There wasn’t even any
excuse; they simply did not have one. The official ticket distributor for the
Olympic Games lost my tickets.
I didn’t get dejected. I didn’t get sad or frustrated or
anything even close. I wasn’t even nervous that things wouldn’t be fixed.
Instead I got angry.
I started off by telling the girl that I wasn’t yelling at
her, and I knew it wasn’t her fault. I always appreciated that when I worked in
customer service, and I hope she did as well. But I said no, no I will not
accept a refund. This is entirely unacceptable. It’s garbage. I flew to London
to go to the Olympic Games, and there is no way that I am walking out of here
without my tickets. Go fix this. I told her I’d be in London for the first week
of the Games, and could attend any women’s gymnastics event that they had
available. If they had that random crappy nosebleed seat lying around, then
maybe they had something else a bit better lying in a random pile as well.
She was gone a while longer. Other people seemed to accept
CoSport’s mistakes and left without much fuss. Me? There was NO way that I was
going to have flown to London for an hour and a half of gymnastics in a
nosebleed seat in the absolute last row of the arena. When she came back out,
she looked happy. I thought maybe she found one of my actual tickets, but that
wasn’t the case. She presented me with a different gymnastics ticket. I looked
first at the price. £450, which is about $700. Before I got excited, I looked at
the date. July 30th. I knew right away what event it was. I handed
the ticket back to her and said I didn’t want it. It was for the men’s team
final. While I appreciated that it was an amazing seat for the event, I didn’t
have much interest in men’s gymnastics. I told her I’d rather have the seat go
to someone whose men’s gymnastics order they messed up. She was a bit dejected.
She thought she had done well, and in her defense all the gymnastics tickets,
for both men and women, just say “artistic gymnastics” on them. It doesn’t
specify what event it is. So this time I gave her the dates of the 2
competitions after the prelims that I could attend, the July 31st
team finals and the August 2nd all-around finals. I’d be in Paris
for event finals, with a train ticket and apartment already paid for, so I
couldn’t attend any of those.
She came back out looking not so happy again. She handed me
the ticket she found. £450. July 31st.
OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
From that moment you would have needed to pry that ticket
out of my cold dead fingers, and even post-mortem I think I would have retained
a firm grip on them. I took my craptastic nosebleed prelim ticket, my ticket to
the WOMEN’S TEAM FINALS, signed the paper saying that I had received my tickets
and was content, and then bounced out of the CoSport office. I had just gone
from 2 blah prelim seats to a $700 ticket for the team finals on the lowest
level of the arena. The face value of that seat costs more than going to the
Super Bowl. I couldn’t believe
what had just happened, and still can’t. Through a stroke of what can only be
described as pure, dumb luck, I was going to the team finals! It was like
winning the lottery! I’ll never be an athlete, but with their unimaginable
ineptitude, CoSport made my own Olympic dreams come true that afternoon. I’d
have the opportunity to watch the United States go for gold. I couldn’t even
begin to express here just how much this meant to me.
Suzy and I went to the Tower of London the next day, and
then that evening I headed to the O2 arena for the evening prelim session.
Here’s the outside of the arena:
And the entrance to the arena – I couldn’t believe I was
really there!
It really worked out well that I didn’t end up going to the
morning prelim session. I didn’t have to wake up early, plus the lineup wasn’t
that great. All of the good teams were slotted for the afternoon session, which
I never got tickets to anyway, except for Romania, who competed at night. So I
watched Romania and had a grand old time. I was at the Olympics! In the very
last row of the arena, but for finals I was downstairs, so I couldn’t care less
about how high I was on that first night.
You can tell how high I am. Even the center scoreboard is in
the rafters below my seat J
The next day I met up with my friend Dany, who I’d met
travelling up Australia’s west coast. Unfortunately for her, she had to
accompany on my painful shopping spree. There was no way I was attending team
finals without American gear. Ever tried to buy USA themed stuff in a foreign
country? It’s not easy! I eventually got a USA Adidas t-shirt with gold, silver
and bronze stripes on the sleeves, red leggings, blue hair ribbons and face
paint. I was going all out!
We spent the rest of the day doing fun stuff. Here I am
doing the classical London tourist pose:
And walking with the M&M’s at the giant candy store:
It was a good day. We walked around the city a lot, also
checked out a museum and had a nice dinner at a hamburger joint, where I had my
first real PICKLE in over a year. Australia and New Zealand don’t do pickles.
It’s epically tragic.
The next day was July 31st: Team Finals Day. On
my way to the tube station, I randomly spotted American flag pants out of the
corner of my eye at a local market. Sweet As! They were cheap too, so I grabbed
them and then headed off. I started by taking the train to Olympic Park, as I
was hoping to walk around. I knew that you couldn’t get into the Olympic
Village unless you were an athlete or coach or part of your country’s
delegation, but I thought the park might be open to stroll around as long as
you passed through security. I was wrong. You couldn’t get into the complex if
you didn’t have a ticket, so I never got to see Olympic Stadium or anything. Ah
well. They had built a giant mall next to Olympic Park though, and that was
filled with tourists and Olympic spectators and quite a few athletes and
coaches as well. So I spent a couple hours wandering through there. I may not
have been able to get into the park or the village, but even the mall had an
Olympic buzz in the air, so I was happy soaking up the atmosphere.
I got to the arena nice and early so that I could bask in
the Olympic atmosphere. Here I am posing in my £450 section:
It was a great view. I was right by vault and beam, with a
good view of floor as well. Bars were on the other side of the arena, so since
I was low-down it was a bit hard to see, but I couldn’t complain. Saw the 2008
Olympic all-around champion walking around on the floor about an hour or so
before the competition started, and I got a little wave from her. I also saw
the 2008 Olympic beam gold medalist in the bathroom before the meet started. I
wonder if we used the same stall???
The competition was awesome. The blog is getting a bit long
already, so I won’t bore you with much more than photos. I could go on and on about the meet and
what happened and what I thought, but I know no one really cares all that much J. You know how it ended
anyway. The USA won by a bit over 5 points, which is huge. That’s five falls.
The last girl who went up could have safely fallen 3-4 times and the United
States would have still won by a country mile.
At the start of the competition, the US and Russia presenting
to the judges before vault:
McKayla Maroney landing the most perfect vault I’ve ever
seen:
Viktoria Komova of Russia on bars:
Future all-around champion Gabby Douglas on beam:
Aly Raisman in her starting pose, waiting for her floor
music to start. This is the USA’s last routine, although the gold is a virtual
lock already. She just needed to find her feet a few times, and everything
would be done:
Waiting for Aly’s score to come up to make it official:
BAM!
Celebrating immediately after:
On the podium (came out a bit fuzzy L… stupid crappy arena
lighting!)
The three medalists: USA, Russia & Romania:
Waving to the crowd:
Me and the back of Shawn Johnson (the blonde chick with the
black backpack). She was the 2008 Olympic gold medalist on beam and silver
medalist in the all-around. Back in 08 she was the “it” girl, whose face was
plastered all over McDonalds bags and Coca Cola boxes.
Me, a girl I made friends with before the meet, and Elfi
Schlegel. You might not know the name or face, but if you’ve watched gymnastics
on NBC any time in the last decade and a half, then you know her voice.
All in all, an absolutely unforgettable day. I’d like to
think it was my gaudy American flag pants that brought all the good luck.
The day after the team finals, I took a trip to Oxford with
Dany.
It was gorgeous, but I was disappointed that you had to pay
to go inside all of the buildings! One day I will give Dany a guided tour of
Cornell, where despite their penchant for nickel and diming people to death,
they have not yet started charging visitors to walk in the door. Later that day
I met up with Suzy for a play. We saw Richard III at the Globe Theater. It was
a recreation of what the Globe looked like back in Shakespeare’s day, as was
the style of performance. The costumes were authentic, and all of the female
roles were played by men. We stood in the pit, right in front of the stage. It
was nice to lean on during the 3 hours of standing. It was a great experience though, seeing Shakespeare the way
people did back in his era. And it was fun being so close to the actors.
Sometimes you had to move your hands out of the way so that they wouldn’t get
stepped on!
The next day I went on a day trip to Brighton, near where
Dany grew up. It’s a beachside town, although it was a bit nippy to go into the
water. We hung out at the arcade on the pier, and a seagull literally landed on
my head to try and steal the remains of my ice cream cone. Had a picnic out in
the countryside, and then we drove to her dad’s house for tv: The all-around
final. You also know how that one turned out as well, as Gabby Douglas became
the 4th American, and first black woman, to with the Olympic
all-around crown. That’s 3 Olympic all-around champions in a row now for the
USA!!!
My next stop was Paris. I had rented a little apartment in
the 6th arrondissement, which was super cute once I figured out how
the keys worked and was able to get inside:
Didn’t have a whole lot on the agenda, as this was my 5th
time visiting the city. Suzy came down for the weekend though from London, so
we had a bit of a wine and cheese party.
The highlight of her weekend visit was of course,
Disneyland. Suzy and I are both hardcore Disney park addicts, so we were able
to accomplish what some might say is impossible. We did both Disney Parks at Disneyland
Paris in one day. On the weekend. During the summer. Now, THAT, my friends, is
Olympic gold-worthy. I also have to say that Disney’s nighttime show, Disney
Dreams, is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t believe what I was
watching, it was incredible. All of you, go to Paris. Go to Disney. Wait for
park closing time and watch what they do to Sleeping Beauty’s castle. It’s
mind-blowing. Here we are during the day. Hours before the nighttime magic
began:
After a few more days in Paris on my own, I flew to Rome.
Never been there before, so I was excited! Got into town quite late, and after
a few unsuccessful attempts to find my hotel in the dodgy little neighborhood
surrounding the train station, I was finally successful and crawled into bed.
I laid out the basics of my plan of attack the next day. I
didn’t know a whole lot about what I wanted to see in Rome, so I was a bit
overwhelmed at first. It’s a big, noisy, stressful and overwhelming place, It’s
also hot as hell in August. It hit 90 degrees by about 9 am every single day.
By mid-day it was downright oppressive being outside. But it’s also a magical
city, where you turn a corner and find the most amazing church or Roman ruin
you could possibly imagine. It’s a modern city with echoes of the past around
every corner. Pretty cool stuff! After a few days I got a feel for the place
and was much more productive in my sightseeing. Again, I won’t bore you with
the history and details of every church and museum that I visited, but here are
some photographic highlights:
Here I am with the Colosseum!
Here are some of the ancient ruins. My one complaint,
addressed to the city of Rome or the country of Italy or whoever is in charge:
LABEL YOUR RUINS. Most of the time I had NO idea what the heck I was looking at,
even with the help of my guidebook. Still though, you get the idea, even if
you’re a bit lost as to what pile of rubble used to be what. Everything is old.
Really old. Really old and jam
packed full of incredible history. But still, a little plaque or sign now and again
would have been SUPER helpful J.
Here I am with one of Rome’s more recent monuments. A lot of
people in the city apparently don’t like it and think it’s a bit gaudy. I
thought it was awesome!
Me and the Pantheon, which is about 2,000 years old. That
building has been there for 2,000 years. Think about that. It’s incredible!
Of course, no visit to Rome would be complete without
visiting the Vatican. I started off my day at the Vatican Museum, where I
waited an hour and a half just to get to the metal detectors. The crowds of
tourists in Rome are unbelievable. People are just everywhere, and there seems
to be no escaping waiting in long lines. The Vatican Museum was worth it
though. Despite the fact that even inside people were jammed in like cattle,
the Vatican Museum is home to the famous Sistine Chapel, which contains some of
the world’s most famous artworks. I don’t have any photos of Michelangelo’s
ceiling frescos or his Last Judgement though. They don’t allow any photos
inside the Sistine Chapel L.
As a useless piece of information, the Sistine Chapel is the only room inside
the Vatican Museum that is air-conditioned. It’s where the cardinals meet for
conclave to elect a new pope, so they don’t want them to melt while they’re
locked inside voting J.
I visited St. Peter’s Basilica and Square that afternoon.
Again, throngs of tourists, but what an amazing sight! The
square is gigantic, and the inside of the church is ornate and decorated beyond
words. I took a few photos, one of which is below, but the pictures don’t
really do it justice. You have to go for yourself to really appreciate just how
splendid the inside is.
So that was Rome in a nutshell! There are loads more to say,
but this blog has already passed being classified as “long,” and we’re now entering
“epically long” territory. I’ll stop here then with my European adventures. I
chose to focus mostly on the Olympics for the entry, as that was the whole
reason for this leg of the journey. Paris and Rome were just icing on the cake.
I do need to take a moment to thank Suzy. Without her
generous offer of a couch back in December, at a wine bar in Queenstown, New
Zealand, I never would have gone to London. CoSport might have done me a
gigantic favor by being utterly inept and losing my tickets, but without Suzy I
never would have been in London to tell them to go and fix their mistake. So
thank you Suzy, for enabling me to make my dream to be an Olympic spectator
come true J.
What’s next? I make my way back to London tomorrow, and then
on Friday I close out the day in my bed in Whitestone. Yup. Can you believe it?
13 ½ months has come and gone, and 2 days from now I’ll be back in Queens. Stay
tuned though, there will be one more entry posted in the next couple of weeks:
The recap, epilogue, thoughts and reflections, or whatever you want to call it.
That one will be well-thought out and constructed, unlike all of my other
entries that were written whenever I could squeeze in the time.
So for now, I bid thee adieu. It’s all coming to an end,
which is incredibly emotional, but I’m also going to try and look at whatever
comes next as an opportunity for a wonderful new beginning J
See ya in North America kiddies!
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