Swimming August 1

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Another fine day today as we spent the first half of the day trying to find how to buy tickets to other Olympic events like archery, boxing, fencing, volleyball, table tennis, equestrian, darts, jarts and cribbage. Badmitten was sold out? Badmitten?! As you can imagine, we could find tickets for the darts, jarts and cribbage but couldn't find the venue...or the time. The one ticket website works for the citizens of Great Britain but not Americans, French Germans, Italians and other members of the Euro. Unfortunately, even the Brits are having trouble finding a ticket to any event.

Which brings us to a major question we have had since we got here. The home team is GB or Great Britain. Jeff has been working on this issue diligently and we have asked many of our newly made British friends whatever happened to England and the United Kingdom? Who does a shot putter from Belfast play for? GB ... Apparently, Scotland and Wales that usually field a team all agreed to be a part of the GB team from what we were able to gather. Stay tuned we may need to pirate a cell phone to get the real answer! Where's Murdock? Well, that won't happen, not the way our phones are working here, make that NOT working here.

Oh well, so we stayed in our room and blogged and blogged and blogged until we just couldn't blog anymore... Plus we were hungry. So we left.

We headed into the Olympic Park and as we waited for our swimming event and met several British couples at our picnic table that were very friendly. We had wonderful discussions with them as several worked in Canary Wharf, the financial district for the likes of Blackrock, Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan. We enjoyed discussing the Opening Games with them as they were shocked, and so were we, yet pleasantly entertained by the Queen's exquisite performance. We all enjoyed her participation in the comedic aspects of the skit and were quite impressed with her skydiving skills... much less her comedic timing. Mr Bean was well, good too... Of course.

Once inside we sat next a very nice couple and watched the meet. Some great swims with a few semi finals one of which will bring us Ryan Lochte and Michael Phelps in yet another showdown in the 200 IM. It is late and I need some sleep! Sweet dreams !

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