Olympics: Fire Garden

July 29th, 2012

I’m really enjoying the Olympics so far. I wasn’t expecting to be this excited for it, but I’ve gotten quite in the Olympic spirit, rooting for both Australia and the Netherlands (and maybe even a little for Team GB). I’ve mainly watched the swimming events from the past two days (the Women’s Freestyle Relay was awesome), and I’ll need to catch up with some of the other sports. I’m now also regretting now trying harder to get tickets; it would have been so good to see some of these events in real life!

For me the Olympic atmosphere properly started a couple days ago on Wednesday. A friend saw on the National Theatre’s site that they were doing a “Fire Garden” exhibition and thought it would be a good plan to meetup with some friends, have dinner and watch whatever the “Fire Garden” was. It was gorgeous weather that day, so of course the Southbank was completely packed with people and of course all the restaurants had large queues. Instead of queueing and waiting to be seated in a overly hot restaurant, we had the brilliant plan of picnicking in Jubilee Park and ordering Wagamama’s takeaway. I’m amazed I’ve never done that before! It was so much more fun and relaxed than actually sitting in a Wagamamas.

After a great dinner, we all realized we were still hungry and had at least an hour to kill till the Fire Garden. So we ended up crossing the river and getting ice cream at Gino’s. I still prefer Lick for the more unique flavours, but Gino’s do really nice traditional Italian ice cream (the website says they even have Bacio flavour which I didn’t notice that night).
With our ice creams in hand we walked to Trafalgar Square to sit on the stairs and enjoy the atmosphere. You could really feel London buzzing that day; everyone was excited for the Olympics and you could sense that excitement in the air. Cristiano made a couple of great pictures:

After sitting there for a while, we slowly made our way back to the Southbank to see what the Fire Garden was. Turns out it the name was exactly right: it was a “garden” of fire to celebrate the Olympic flame coming to London. It looked awesome! I didn’t manage to walk through it though; the moment I got close to the path my eyes teared up completely.