In case you’ve been out of the country or have had your eyes and ears shut these past few weeks, London has hosted the 2012 Olympic Games and what a fortnight it has been. The coverage has been pretty immense and both through the television and radio waves and we have been hooked. Inspire a Generation…Inspire Roscoe and Rutter too!

We were lucky enough to get our hands on some Olympic tickets for London 2012 thanks to the Roscoe parents putting in a successful bid for the first night of Track and Field and we also picked up some tickets for the Women’s Team Foil Fencing event taking place at the Excel Arena.

It has to be said that we loved our Olympic experience. Starting with the fencing, which neither of us have any prior knowledge of we just liked the thought of getting to one of the lesser known Olympic sports. En-route we were greeted with Thai tourists eagerly anticipating one of their top table tennis players, always drawn to a group shot we couldn’t resist sneaking one there and then.

In the Excel arena Boxing, Judo, Table Tennis and Badminton were all taking place with more events going on there in the second week of action. Within the fencing competition we saw lots of competitive action too and Team GB were out in force attempting to go through the rounds. Fencing is tough to follow but we could tell who were the favorites  through the rounds with Italy and France having the most International support in the crowd. Happening in the Excel arena that day also saw an epic Judo silver medal from Team GB’s Gemma Gibbons, so there was a lot of buzz at Excel throughout.

The next day we were so excited to be taking our turn at the Olympic Athletics Stadium accompanied by Jan and Den (Helen’s parents). We’d been staying in Bromley for a few days and were very pleased with the transport links, the underground ran smoothly all around central London and the free Zone 1-9 railcards which came with the tickets were well used. For our final night we opted to camp with the parents out in Theydon Bois. A campground that is right next to the train station and a 25 minute ride to the Olympic Park. Perfect.

Once we were in the Olympic Park we were greeted by a pretty slick security procedure and thousands of people doing the same, so another thumbs up on that side of things too. The amount of people in the park was amazing, quite overwhelming and the buzz was so exciting. We managed to explore the park pretty well walking towards and around many of the other sporting venues finishing our stroll in Park Live where a large double sided screen attracted even more thousands of people checking out the action in the velodrome. For some people this was where they would watch the action from. Perhaps our biggest criticism about the park was that they could have done with more screens around as there were big queues for getting into Park Live, which at peak times operated on a one-in-one-out basis.

At 6pm we made our way to our seats in the Olympic Stadium, spotting Catherine Merry on the way in doing her bit for Five Live Sport. We were quite high up in the stadium with seats pretty much opposite the 100m finish. After the initial excitement and photographs of us in there surrounded by nearly 80,000 others doing the same we started to enjoy the action. Greg Rutherford was going in the long jump qualifying, little did we know we were watching a champion in the making and also Jess Ennis competed in both the shot put and 200m as part of her Olympic winning performance. It was all quite overwhelming at times and Helen had to fight back a few tears each time the roars from the crowd got behind a home athlete, especially Ennis, she is a little star!

We also saw the 100m qualifying rounds which saw race after race go under 11 seconds, fast!! The women’s discus qualifying took place and the men’s shot put final saw the heavy weights in action with the finishing event being the light-weights in the women’s 10,000m final. Never has a stadium applauded such an event on the first night of action. Jan and Den were in Athens and Beijing and were astounded by the support.

Our biggest annoyance was the use of music whilst competitors were trying to achieve their physical peak performance. Music pumping straight into the audience was just a little too much at times when trying to concentrate on a certain event. We appreciate that they were appealing to the mass audience who want to see a show, and perhaps this compensated a little for the price of tickets…who knows, surely the athletic performance is a show enough in itself? And why Ben Sheppard was there…it’s not X-Factor, this is the Olympic Games!

Taking this aside we were thrilled with our Olympic experience and wanted to go again and again to support the athletes from around the world, competing at the highest level. This is something to be admired and we felt proud that the British pulled off a fantastic games, a wonderful Olympic Park and look at where we finished on the medal table, fourth, wow! Not bad for a country of 60 million!

In September we’re back in the Olympic Stadium for the Paralympic closing ceremony and in between we may try to sneak in a few tickets for Paralympic action, which is set to have more of a following than in any other Paralympic Games in history.

Posting a blog post everyday which involves writing a mini diary and editing through copious amounts of photos takes up lots of time. Therefore we have decided that as we are a few weeks behind we are going to try and condense the posts into multiple days. Also here in China we have access to most websites that we need for general use, however there is no Twitter or Facebook, so we will be very quiet on these social networks until we leave China in early 2011.

So here we go…on our second day in Beijing we were on a mission to find out about trips and local sights aside from the more obvious ones. We obtained a street map from Templeside that gave us pretty good bearings on where we were located plus Frank had informed us of the nearest tube stops, bus stops and the like. What we didn’t really think about was the distance it takes to get from one block to another on foot. We had intended to go to the China Cultural Centre (CCC) to find out about trips and cooking classes on offer but several tube stops later, one taxi journey and a walk 20 minutes in the wrong direction we redirected to 798. We had intended to visit the 798 Art district early on in our visit here anyway so it wasn’t too much of a change of plan.

Although we feel that the many art critics and cynics out there would refer to 798 as art tourism, it still offers an eclectic mix of contemporary art and culture that isn’t so apparent anywhere else in the city. 798 is an old factory complex that has been renovated into around 70 or so art spaces, galleries, studios, cafes, quirky gift shops and restaurants. We thought it was pretty cool, although perhaps not all of the art on show is to our taste and perhaps some is trend for trends sake it does take you away from more traditional aspects of Chinese art and culture and perhaps brings it more inline with the graffiti lined walls of Berlin city. We do love Berlin though so that one is always going to be tough to beat!! But in our minds it did the trick and we quickly forgot about the directionless walk around the city. We picked up a mandarin phrase book which we think will come in very handy indeed whilst we are in China and we photographed buildings, spaces and art on show. (Copyright isn’t really an issue here as you can pretty much photograph any piece of art on show). The photography gallery showcased some interesting compilation work and we liked the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, although it seemed much of the space was closed off for an event. We did manage to find our way back to our new home that evening and cooked ourselves our first meal in the Hutong.

The next day we decided to stay a little more local and our first port of call was to visit the Peking International Youth Hostel. Helen was determined to pick up some information from a hostel and we also wanted to print out some information and directions to show taxi drivers. As a general rule they wont stop to listen to where you want to go but will look at the map or if you have where you want to go in Chinese written down bingo you’re in luck! Sometimes even if you speak Chinese but look western they wont listen!! So with that in mind we had some printing to do and our reason for going to the hostel was that we feel by being in the apartment, yes it’s great because we are in with a local community but you don’t really get to meet other travelers or get the best kind of advice. So if you can find out where the nearest YHA is often they will have the info and the passing travelers to meet!! We went away with our print outs, some info on tours and enjoyed an amazing ginger honey tea!!

Within walking distance of the YHA is Beihai Park. It costs around £2.5 to get in and there are a few temples and pagodas in the park. It was a really sunny day and the sky was pretty blue so the white pagoda on the top of the hill really did shine. It was a really enjoyable walk up through the temples and to the top where you have views across the Forbidden City, Beihai lake and beyond. We spent the best part of the day here and also came across the Chrysanthemum exhibition. Something of an anticlimax but it did offer some great photographic opportunities and the low afternoon light was perfect for this.

On our third morning at the penthouse apartment (he he) we ventured to the very local farmers market to pick up some fruit and veg and to generally take in the atmosphere that contains the place. The market sells not only fruit and veg supplies but household cleaning products, gas cookers, bikes, meat, fish, tea and clothes, alongside which was street vendors selling food to eat there and then or noodles to cook, meat off the bone and so on. It’s a very local place and it was loads of fun buying our grocery shopping. We were amazed at how cheap the fresh fruit and veg is to buy. for less than 20 pence we bought a bulb of garlic, one green pepper and two chili peppers…they have money that looks more like monopoly money for values under 1 yuan. We were moaned at for only buying 1 or 2 of any item. Still we went away filling our fridge with good quality fresh food. We explored the local hutong further before heading back for more catch up time on editing.

(Leica M9, Summicron-M 50mm f2.0 & Olympus PEN, 17mm f2.8 & 100mm f2.8, processed in Lightroom 3)