Olympics Adventure: The Football
[Oh dear, it seems that time has been flying here in the UK and I am several days behind on updating this travel blog! Please bear with me as I slowly climb back on top of thigs...]
It seems like all I do in England is always volleyball-related, so when acquiring my tickets I made sure to purchase a couple other sports to help balance things out. I definitely made sure to get some soccer tickets (it's called "football" here in crazytown) because I used to play and didn't want to pass up the opportunity to see some top level competition, and then I bought judo tickets because I wanted to go see something I wouldn't ordinarily see and about which I did not already know anything. I also wanted to break up the giant gap in the middle of the stay, since all my other sports seemed to be at the very beginning and the very end of my 2 week trip.
Before getting to these events, though, I spent a transition day moving into my friend's flat, getting sorted with the whole phone situation (life is SO MUCH EASIER with a phone! How did we used to function without these things?!), and just walking around taking in the London Olympics vibe. I stopped by Costa Coffee (that and Nero are like the Starbuckses of England, though of course Starbucks is all over the place here as well), and I hung out in a little plaza by my friend's office where they'd set up a handful of large-screen TVs under a big white tent for passerbys to just chill out and watch the games together. On one side of the plaza they had a table tennis game set up, and in a couple corners they had statues of the spooky Olympic mascot (I keep forgetting his name... Wenslock maybe???). The Olympic volunteers in this random corner of the city (not remotely close to any actual Olympic venues) are still super friendly and helpful, and they practically fell over themselves to offer to take my photo with the spooky mascot (I elected for the one inexplicably dressed as an alien mariachi, as described by a kind Facebook commenter) and to give me London maps. These people are so great I keep stopping to ask for directions even though I don't need them half the time.
In the evening my friend took me out in her hood for dinner. She lives right off of a street famous for it's curry restaurants, though according to my friend they are not that good and only tourists go there. I didn't like the vibe because some dudes stand in the doorways trying to entice you in, and it just feels so sketchy. As a young woman I have an ingrained instinct to recoil from random dudes on the street who yell at me to try to get me into their domicile/van/whatever, so it did not bode well. But we headed past the curry restaurants and north a bit into her old hood, where authentic Vietamese is the specialty (and it was delicious). It was a pretty hip/alternative/artsy scene, with tons of street art that appears and disappears quickly (think Banksy). I even passed a group going on a tour of local graffiti art, which was pretty cool.
The day after my transfer from West London to East London, I headed back West again for my first football match at Wembley Stadium (stopping along the way at Spitfields Covered Market for yummy yummy crepes). I was supposed to meet my fried at the tube stop since I had her ticket, but the complete chaos I encountered upon leaving the train made it clear that would be quite impossible to achieve. What lay before me was one of the biggest crowds I have ever seen in my life (coming second only to the Daily Show's rally on the mall a couple years back). A giant sea of people was swarming forwards out of the turnstiles, then coming to a staircase overerlooking the quarter mile or so walkway to the arena. Every inch was packed with shoulder-to-shoulder people, and the whole mess was trudging forward, never stopping because a woman with a bullhorn stood behind us screeching "Keep moving! Do not stop at the stairs to take a photo! It will cause a safety hazard! Keep moving! Keep moving! Mary Donovan, come towards my voice- your father is looking for you! Everyone else, keep moving!" I found a little cove of other people who were waiting off to the side and parked myself there despite the "Do Not Stand Here" sign behind me. My friend arrived 15 minutes later but was unable to make the difficult maneuver off to the side before being swept over the edge of the staircase by the waterfall of human bodies around her, so I had to crisscross the whole shebang somewhat aggressively to get over to her.
Luckily from that point forwards things went super smoothly. The crowd was massive, but Wembley is very well organized so you have a pre-assigned outer entrance that takes you straight up to your section within the arena. Security was, yet again, super quick, though the interesting thing there was that they pat down every single person, so you have to form separate men's and women's queues. Weirdness. I had only paid 20 pounds for these tickets (the lowest price bracket), so I assumed we'd be up in the heaves somewhere watching some tiny dots down below run around a mile below us. Oh no. No no no. We were in the 7th row. Not the 7th row on the top tier. The 7th row in the entire arena. We could see the whites of the players' eyes. We were down on the end behind the goalpost and to the left, so realistically we could only tell what was going on when the ball was down on our end (the only rational explanation for why those tickets were so cheap), but that means we had an amazing view for every single play on goal (and let's be real- that's the only exciting part of soccer anyway). The final score was 0-0 between S. Korea and Gabon, though, so not the most exciting game, and not the most sensational teams. The most entertaining bit was that one of the Gabon players got injured during the opening kickoff (not sure how), so the first 10 minutes or so were just his injury being checked out, the stretcher being brought out, him trying to run back on to play again and yet again requiring a stretcher and stoppage of play, etc. Good stuff.
There were just under 77,000 people in attendance, and they all had to swarm right back to the Tube station, so we took our dear sweet time leaving the arena. We stayed behind and chatted a bit, the moved outside and chatted a bit there while watching bizarre behavior from some other Olympics fans, then separated and headed off to the trains (my friend was using a different station for her return trip). The crowd was still insanely huge and slow-moving, so I stopped for a burger from a nearby stand and sat in a spooky abandoned lot, shivering in the cold and looking up at the titanic stadium before me. This killed a nice chunk of time, but the path to the stadium was still completely nuts, and I trudged with the masses the rest of the way. It was an hour ad a half after the game ended when I finally got on a train out of there. Yowza!
It seems like all I do in England is always volleyball-related, so when acquiring my tickets I made sure to purchase a couple other sports to help balance things out. I definitely made sure to get some soccer tickets (it's called "football" here in crazytown) because I used to play and didn't want to pass up the opportunity to see some top level competition, and then I bought judo tickets because I wanted to go see something I wouldn't ordinarily see and about which I did not already know anything. I also wanted to break up the giant gap in the middle of the stay, since all my other sports seemed to be at the very beginning and the very end of my 2 week trip.
Before getting to these events, though, I spent a transition day moving into my friend's flat, getting sorted with the whole phone situation (life is SO MUCH EASIER with a phone! How did we used to function without these things?!), and just walking around taking in the London Olympics vibe. I stopped by Costa Coffee (that and Nero are like the Starbuckses of England, though of course Starbucks is all over the place here as well), and I hung out in a little plaza by my friend's office where they'd set up a handful of large-screen TVs under a big white tent for passerbys to just chill out and watch the games together. On one side of the plaza they had a table tennis game set up, and in a couple corners they had statues of the spooky Olympic mascot (I keep forgetting his name... Wenslock maybe???). The Olympic volunteers in this random corner of the city (not remotely close to any actual Olympic venues) are still super friendly and helpful, and they practically fell over themselves to offer to take my photo with the spooky mascot (I elected for the one inexplicably dressed as an alien mariachi, as described by a kind Facebook commenter) and to give me London maps. These people are so great I keep stopping to ask for directions even though I don't need them half the time.
In the evening my friend took me out in her hood for dinner. She lives right off of a street famous for it's curry restaurants, though according to my friend they are not that good and only tourists go there. I didn't like the vibe because some dudes stand in the doorways trying to entice you in, and it just feels so sketchy. As a young woman I have an ingrained instinct to recoil from random dudes on the street who yell at me to try to get me into their domicile/van/whatever, so it did not bode well. But we headed past the curry restaurants and north a bit into her old hood, where authentic Vietamese is the specialty (and it was delicious). It was a pretty hip/alternative/artsy scene, with tons of street art that appears and disappears quickly (think Banksy). I even passed a group going on a tour of local graffiti art, which was pretty cool.
The day after my transfer from West London to East London, I headed back West again for my first football match at Wembley Stadium (stopping along the way at Spitfields Covered Market for yummy yummy crepes). I was supposed to meet my fried at the tube stop since I had her ticket, but the complete chaos I encountered upon leaving the train made it clear that would be quite impossible to achieve. What lay before me was one of the biggest crowds I have ever seen in my life (coming second only to the Daily Show's rally on the mall a couple years back). A giant sea of people was swarming forwards out of the turnstiles, then coming to a staircase overerlooking the quarter mile or so walkway to the arena. Every inch was packed with shoulder-to-shoulder people, and the whole mess was trudging forward, never stopping because a woman with a bullhorn stood behind us screeching "Keep moving! Do not stop at the stairs to take a photo! It will cause a safety hazard! Keep moving! Keep moving! Mary Donovan, come towards my voice- your father is looking for you! Everyone else, keep moving!" I found a little cove of other people who were waiting off to the side and parked myself there despite the "Do Not Stand Here" sign behind me. My friend arrived 15 minutes later but was unable to make the difficult maneuver off to the side before being swept over the edge of the staircase by the waterfall of human bodies around her, so I had to crisscross the whole shebang somewhat aggressively to get over to her.
Luckily from that point forwards things went super smoothly. The crowd was massive, but Wembley is very well organized so you have a pre-assigned outer entrance that takes you straight up to your section within the arena. Security was, yet again, super quick, though the interesting thing there was that they pat down every single person, so you have to form separate men's and women's queues. Weirdness. I had only paid 20 pounds for these tickets (the lowest price bracket), so I assumed we'd be up in the heaves somewhere watching some tiny dots down below run around a mile below us. Oh no. No no no. We were in the 7th row. Not the 7th row on the top tier. The 7th row in the entire arena. We could see the whites of the players' eyes. We were down on the end behind the goalpost and to the left, so realistically we could only tell what was going on when the ball was down on our end (the only rational explanation for why those tickets were so cheap), but that means we had an amazing view for every single play on goal (and let's be real- that's the only exciting part of soccer anyway). The final score was 0-0 between S. Korea and Gabon, though, so not the most exciting game, and not the most sensational teams. The most entertaining bit was that one of the Gabon players got injured during the opening kickoff (not sure how), so the first 10 minutes or so were just his injury being checked out, the stretcher being brought out, him trying to run back on to play again and yet again requiring a stretcher and stoppage of play, etc. Good stuff.
There were just under 77,000 people in attendance, and they all had to swarm right back to the Tube station, so we took our dear sweet time leaving the arena. We stayed behind and chatted a bit, the moved outside and chatted a bit there while watching bizarre behavior from some other Olympics fans, then separated and headed off to the trains (my friend was using a different station for her return trip). The crowd was still insanely huge and slow-moving, so I stopped for a burger from a nearby stand and sat in a spooky abandoned lot, shivering in the cold and looking up at the titanic stadium before me. This killed a nice chunk of time, but the path to the stadium was still completely nuts, and I trudged with the masses the rest of the way. It was an hour ad a half after the game ended when I finally got on a train out of there. Yowza!