Opening Ceremonies

The instructions tell me the athletes are to start arriving for the opening ceremonies at about 3pm, so I head over to the Olympic Park early because I'm not sure how busy the trains will be. Things are kind of dead when I get there, so I wander around for awhile. A little after 3, I head into the stadium where they are organizing the athletes. They are having us march into the ANZ Stadium with our sport, not our country, so I will be with Athletics.
Some people from Whistler were sitting behind me, so I started chatting with them. Another lady was with them and she turned out to be Diane, who made the World Record with Helly Visser last year for the 4 x 400m women's over 70 team. There was also a Canadian 91 year old woman who had just won 2 medals for shot put and something else. Pretty darn good!
Finally it was time to start to march into the Stadium. I ran into David Guss from Calgary, so we chatted and walked in together. His wife is playing soccer, so she was way back with the soccer group. We were right by Janice McCaffrey and her whole gang, who were decked out with Canadian flags, so we tagged along with them. It was amazing to see so many Canadians, we definitely made our presence known.
I also met an Australian lady, Rosemarie, who had done the 10K earlier in the day and a fella from Melbourne named Gary. Gary was quite the character, by the end of the night he was waving a Canadian flag he stole from someone and dancing with some girls from Brazil.
The entertainment was mostly "up and coming" Australian singers and some old (dare I say, washed up) Australian singers. It was a really long day, but fun all the same.
I'm pretty sure this is as close as I will come to feeling like an Olympian!