Boos from the Olympic Opening Ceremony Rehearsal
When I woke up yesterday morning, I didn’t expect to find myself ending the day in the Olympic Stadium – but a text message from a friend who’d got some last minute tickets to the Opening Ceremony Rehearsal changed all that. So I went along with my girlfriend, to see what the Olympics was actually going to be like.
When we first got there… Stratford station and Westfield were insanely busy.
After a surprisingly brief security queue given the many thousands of people there we entered the park to hear music blaring on speakers and thousands of people buying refreshments – all in the shadow of the Orbit and the stadium itself.
As you might expect with the Olympic sponsors having a captive audience, some of the prices were marked up a little bit. And being a bit of a cheapskate – I couldn’t help but comment on this.
The Olympics are going to be a huge showcase for Britain – and luckily the Olympic Park has lots of opportunities to show-off the Great British Pastime: Queueing.
And finally we got into the Olympic Stadium itself – though perhaps understandably, we weren’t really allowed to broadcast anything about the ceremony itself – the organisers urging us to #savethesurprise. This didn’t deter us though – as we still offered the best commentary that we could.
The stadium filled up rather quickly and a long time before the show – so much so that with 40 minutes to go before the pre-show several Mexican Waves made it around the stadium successfully – and my girlfriend and I accidentally stumbled upon a British vs North American English linguistic disparity:
There was a pre-show that started just after 8pm – at 20:12 (geddit?) – with the main rehearsal starting at 9. Shortly before the main show we recorded this:
And after it was all over – despite a broken Central Line (one of the key train routes to the Olympic Park) – remarkably we managed to get out of the stadium and get back home in Lambeth all within an hour. Here’s our spoiler free review of what we saw of the ceremony.
Will you be watching on Friday? Why not record a Boo and tell us your reaction?
