Swim Like an Olympian

Saturday, July 28

So it turns out we lied in one of our earlier posts. We still had to get up early one more time on this trip. Though it wasn’t ungodly early, we were still woken by our alarm at 7am. I felt like a little kid on Christmas morning – I was up and ready to go in minutes. To Stephen, we were going to a swimming pool, so I think his excitement was just a little less palpable than mine.

We had looked online yesterday and found that the main lap pool opened at 8:30am, and I wanted to make sure we were there before it was super crowded. We also figured out which train we needed to take to get to Olympic Park, and by 7:30, we were on our way. As per usual, we worked on our crosswords and took in the scenery. 

By 8:30, we had made it to Olympic park, very close to where we had been on our Blue Mountain tour. We found the signs for the Aquatic Center and at a fairly quick pace, made a beeline for the entrance.

When we got there, it was packed! Tons of people with small children, and after paying $7 each to swim, I began to panic. According to the white board behind the entrance, the main pool closed at 9am! It was almost 8:45. We got down to the pools, changed into our swim suits, and attempted to put our things in a locker. Minor detail – we needed $2 coins to pay for the locker. We had no coins. Stephen had to go back to the entrance to exchange some bills while I continued to have my small panic attack. By 8:55, our stuff was in the locker and we were headed to the lap pool.

Another detail – there were tons of pools here. After the 2000 olympics, the aquatic center had been somewhat converted into an indoor  water park, with a shallow pool with play structures for small children, jacuzzis for parents, and a short lap pool where close to 50 children were participating in swim lessons. 

There was still the main pool and diving well that only had a few people in it, but if it closed at 9am, I was going to have to move to the small pool, which I was not excited about.

Therefore, Stephen and I headed directly to the lap pool, with the knowledge that the lifeguards could come over any minute and kick us out, but until that moment, we should capitalize on the opportunity as best as possible. 

As luck would have it – no one came to kick us out. For those of you who don’t know, one of my former baby sitters (a Stanford swimmer) – Tommy Wilkins – swam in the 2000 Sydney Olympics and took home the bronze medal, so being here was of particular importance to me. The most exciting part, I think, was convincing a life guard to let me do one start off the blocks, which was way cool. Though Stephen is not part-fish like me, he still had a good time, especially since the score boards were showing the live feed of the opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics. Nothing like swimming in an Olympic pool while watching the Olympics. 

We were in the water for over an hour, swimming, racing each other, and watching the ceremony. It was a lot of fun. We finally got out, only after I was convinced I absorbed enough chlorine to smell like a pool the rest of the day, and took showers in fairly unclean locker rooms.

We then walked around the rest of the Aquatic center, sitting in the stadium seats, standing on the Olympic podium, and comparing our heights and foot sizes to those of Australian Olympian cut-outs spread throughout the center.

 

As we were getting ready to leave, my flip-flops decided they had been through enough, and decided to break. Despite Stephen’s valiant attempts to fix the flip flop, no cure was possible, so we headed into the Olympic village to try to find a drug store that might have a possible solution. We had tried the Aquatic Center gift shop, but they had no flip flops.

Good news – we found a drug store fairly quickly. Bad news – the sold neither flip flops nor things we could use to fix the flip flops. Good news – they did sell other shoes – thin ballet flats that compact to the size of a purse – sold for women who want to wear high heels out but want something comfortable to walk home in. We bought them, they fit, and were the fanciest shoes I on the entire trip.

With both of my feet covered, we then headed to the Olympic torch which had been lit to mark the beginning of the new Olympics. It looked pretty sweet, especially with water flowing from all sides – making it much cooler than when we had originally seen in early July. 

After taking more pictures and walking through the entire village, we hopped on a train back to downtown Sydney, stopped by the hotel to get me good walking shoes, and wandered one last time through downtown, mostly window shopping and people watching. Most interesting person award goes to the six year old Asian boy playing his violin hooked up to an amp in the middle of the outdoor mall to make money. We had vegan pizza for dinner and watched some of the first Olympic events, and headed to bed for the last night in Australia before heading home.