31st July: Basketball

And so my FIRST PROPER EVENT!

Having had the amazing experience of the opening ceremony it was time to get down to business, and my first event to watch was the Men’s Basketball Preliminary rounds.

TfL had overplanned a little, sending a massive double decker bus when the kids are in school.

Today I tried out the Overground service – this was a risk because it used to be a long standing joke that this service was  almost always cancelled when I used to commute into the city.

But it certainly was running and I came slap bang into Stratford, which was heaving with shoppers and Olympic Park folks

I met up with my friend in the late afternoon at Stratford so that we could soak in the atmosphere of the Olympic Park now that events were up and running in the park.

Of course – this was my first chance to go hit the London 2012 Megastore and let’s just say some serious damage was done to my credit card so that I could support Team GB properly attired!

We wandered around for a bit and then headed to the “Wedding Cake” structure and spotted some more unusual eateries and we thought we would try them out in between the two matches.

It was really nice NOT to be in a UK based crowd for once, and just soak up the atmosphere of other fans going nuts for their teams.

Thankfully my friend is a US sports aficionado so I got a crash course in Basketball rules while the match was going on – which really helped in terms of perspective as you could then see and understand what was going on.

The first match up was France and Argentina – with hefty crowds supporting both.

The game was really close – France would seem to surge ahead and then all of a sudden Argentina would be right up there with him, but in the end France edged it.

What was irritating was that when we decided to go for dinner, we were not allowed out of the Baskbetball arena perimeter to get access to a wider range of food, and we spent so much time wandering around to try and find alternatives, only to be told that apparently there had been announcements to get food before going in (an hour or so ago!).

Also – I have to say eating at around 10pm was not my cleverest idea – note to self: don’t do that again!

Anyway – I queued for an unappealing posh sausages in a bap, and then headed back in for the next match up: USA vs Tunisia.

I felt quite proud of myself to recognise names like Lebron James, Kevin Durrant and Kobe Bryant.

Tunisa actually made quite a spirited start, taking some points off the US, but pretty soon the dream team started to do their thing.  Apparently, according to my friend, the things they were doing were “sick”… which is good!

This was a very different match – Tunisia went off the boil as you might expect until the end, but by then it was pretty much a foregone conclusion and was left wondering of the scoreboard could handle scores in the hundreds (yes it can!).

Of course no Stratford train to come home on, so we were back to last train homesville, this time around 2 am but again the train services were all OK on the way home.