London by Night is a Wonderful Sight: Olympic Park Stadium

As most of you know (or should know) London is hosting the Olympics this summer. Unfortunately I won't be here when they start from July to August. Today while the rest of our friends were lame and did homework, me and Greta explored the Olympic Park Stadium area.

Some fun facts about London and the Olympics:

London will be the first city to have hosted the modern Olympic games 3 times - 1908, 1948, and 2012
London found out it would be hosting the 2012 Olympics in 2005 - That means 7 years to prepare
This is the first time that the Olympic Logo is the same for the Olympic and Paralympic games
London will use many venues that were already built such as the O2 which I saw in Greenwich
The main site for the Olympic games is Stratford (east London). This area was in need of redevelopment. London is using the Olympics to improve this area
In 2011 the largest European shopping mall called Westfield was finished right near the Olympic Park
The Opening and Closing ceremonies will take place in the Olympic Stadium which holds 80,000 people
After the Olympics the Stadium will be used for other large world class events. The stadium can be reduced to hold 25,000 people.
Velodrome is a new stadium built for the cycling events. It's roof looks like a Pringles chip and is therefore called the Pringle.

About my journey:

At 11:00 am me and Greta headed out to find the Olympic Park Stadium. The closest tube stop is Stratford but that is in zone 3 (aka cost more money) so we took the tube to Mile End and decided to walk for 20-30 mins. Everything was going great; we were following signs that said to Olympic Park Stadium but after about a half mile, the path to the stadium was closed for construction. We then continued to follow the roads that said diversion (detour). We had found 2 other groups that were obviously trying to get to the stadium just like us. The diversion signs were stupid and lead us no where (so we thought - continue reading to find out if they really were stupid). We even asked locals to help us out but they lead us back to the area where the path was closed off. We needed to regroup so we went back to the main street and decided to walk another block or two because there must be another entrance to the stadium. And we were right! We found the main entrance and decided to walk right in. This was the real entrance for the athletes and guest when the games start but since Greta had a very official camera we thought maybe they'd think we were reporters or professionals and just let us be. We were wrong. This man told us we couldn't be here and showed us the direction to the "view tube" where we had been trying to get the whole day. The view tube is a platform where you can see the Olympic Stadium and all the construction going on. We knew we were in the right direction when we found a bunch of other tourists going the same way. By 1:00 we made it to the Olympic Park Stadium view tube and were hungry. Lucky for us there was a cafe there. We spent a lot of time taking pictures of the stadium and reading about the construction process on the stadium and the area. In order to get back to the main street to go home we walked along the path that was parallel to the stadium. At the end of the path we reached the area that the diversion signs had lead us to. When we first reached the intersection we turned right and went in a circle (that's why we thought the signs were stupid) but if we would have gone left we would have made it to the stadium in half the time! It's ok because we did more exploring on our extra long journey.