If you are planning on heading to the 2012 Summer Olympics in London you will want to go well prepared. Hav ea look at these lessons I learned after trips to both the Athens and Beijing Olympics.
Travel Between the Venues Can Take a Long Time
Despite the excellent transportation facilities, extra taxis and fewer regular traffic on the roads, travelling between the venues in Beijing could sometimes take an hour or more. The city is just so big and some of the venues were extremely spread out which meant long journeys between events. With this in mind, make sure you plan accordingly. Look at the London 2012 venue map in advance and don't book tickets to events that are on opposite sides of the city unless you have a couple of hours in between.
Tickets Can Be Bought and Sold At the Event
If you didn't get an event you really wanted to go to or if your country is doing really well and you want to follow them, just head to the venue an hour early and ask around for tickets. In my experiences there are always plenty of tickets on offer, especially if you are willing to pay a bit more for them. Likewise, if you want to unload extra tickets, you should be able to do it before the events starts.
Food Inside the Venues is Terrible
In both China and Greece I would have expected the food to be excellent. Sadly and strangely though, it wasn't. Food inside the venues consisted mainly of junk food like cookies and chocolate bars. In Athen the only 'real' food options were pizza and hotdogs and, in Beijing, you could buy mysterious self-heating noodle boxes complete with a huge amount of plastic packaging, but only at some of the events. Fortunately, beer was cheap!
Dressing Up Makes Everything More Fun
In Beijing, my friend and I made sure to get all geared up for each event. If either of our countries (Australia or Canada) weren't competing, we put on our China t-shirts, hats and flag caps and went in support of China. It was a huge crowd pleaser and we met loads of friendly locals this way and made our way into plenty of their photo albums, no doubt. So to spice the whole experience up, come with a good supply of flags, t-shirts, wigs, face paint, funny hats... whatever you can think of.
Come Prepared to Party
The Olympics are all about sports by day and partying at night. If you want to party, you will always have somewhere to do it at any hour of the day. It can be tough to keep up with the pace so go prepared for many sleepless nights and a lot of time spent partying with athletes and other fans from all around the world.
Bring Some Items to Trade
Olympic fans love to trade things. Whether it be the ever popular pins, flags of your home country, hats, shirts, noisemakers, inflatable hockey sticks and kangaroos... it doesn't matter. If you come with things to trade, you will leave with a lot of interesting souvenirs from all around the world.
ไม่มีความคิดเห็น:
แสดงความคิดเห็น