Opening Ceremony Rehearsal

A few weeks back, us Games Makers were sent an email about a competition for tickets to attend the rehearsal of the Opening Ceremony. We needed to answer one easy multiple-answer question, email it to the organizers and then hope for the best. Well, in the end it turned out the best did happen to a lot of us, coz there were thousands of us Games Makers who turned up at the two rehearsals that were open to the public!

So I got one ticket for the rehearsal last Wed 25th July and I was well ecstatic about it. I realized that this might be the only time I would have the chance to enter the Olympic Park throughout the Olympics, so I really wanted to make the most of my time there.

A lot things didn't go to plan that day; my train from Southampton was 20 minutes delayed, then at Waterloo the tube station was closed due to a fire alert. And then when I did get into the Olympic Park, my two camera batteries died even before I got into the Olympic Stadium, so I had to rely on my old Nokia brick phone to take pictures during the rehearsal!

Nonetheless, I managed to get in, and it was an amazing experience, from arriving into Stratford tube station, all the way to the rehearsal itself. There must've been around 60,000 people in the park that day, and everyone seemed really excited that the Olympics is finally here. Unfortunately they closed off the North Park, so we only had half of the Olympic Park to wander round.

I've got loads of photos on my Facebook page, so if you've got the right privacy settings then you'll be able to see them ;)

During the rehearsals, they didn't disclose everything to us. They blanked out the Queen's heli-jump, and also Mr Bean's sketch, plus we definitely didn't see the cauldron at all. They got Games Makers to stand in as the Queen and Prince Phillip which was awesome! Plus, I was sitting at the front row (woohoo!) which would've been brilliant save from the fact that I'm short and I couldn't really see much past the shrubs that were dumped right in front of me during the Industrial Revolution scene! So I was really looking forward to seeing how it was all going to come together on TV, and it was just as spectacular as I had experienced it :)

I'm slightly peeved that I didn't realize that Tim Berners-Lee was gonna be in it!! I saw a man typing away underneath the raised house, but the screen didn't say who it was, and he just seemed like an ordinary bloke just typing away, as you do.. Now I'll never know if it really was him that I saw on Wednesday, or whether it was just some stand-in!

I left the stadium at 22:20, right at the beginning of the "athletes" march (they got troops and Games Makers to stand in!), and it took me an hour just to get to the tube platforms! Immense credit to the Games Makers in charge of traffic flow. It was a difficult job, yet they were all happy and smiling and their banter with the crowd was ace. Hope to carry on their good work when I start soon :)

P/S: I'm quite impressed that everybody did their bit to #savethesurprise. I guess the winning trick was to get Danny Boyle to come out and ask the audience not to spoil it!