Lufthansa, don't you dare

Well, as thousands of athletes left Great Britain, I followed suit and I'm currently in Germany staying with an absolutely lovely family and having lots of degree-related fun. Much to the ginger's delight, the 39°C temperatures of two weeks ago have now seemingly come to an end, and I am now able to venture outside without being armed with litres of sun cream and looking more (interesting gardening tan lines aside) like an at least half-normal member of society than an overheated red-headed lobster.

However, even in the midst of my zip-lining Klassenfahrt and spontaneous quarter-marathon adventures, I have managed to achieve something truly monumental. No, I have neither beaten Lin Dan nor sprinted faster than Usain Bolt...

...I have checked my emails!

And, my inbox contained something even more exciting than spam messages offering me an iPhone 4/ quick weight loss tips/ £1,000,000 for being 1,000,000th visitor to www.thereisnowaythatieveropenedthispage.com.

It contained a 100% LOCOG-approved-legitimate email entering me into a ballot to be one of 9,000 Olympic volunteers to attend the athlete's parade through the streets of London on Monday 10th.

To cut the long story short... checking emails brings prizes and the Games Maker uniform is getting another outing in a couple of days. The Mopper is obviously extremely excited about this.

However, as always, the Mopper's transport adventures continue and she is due to fly back with Lufthansa on Sunday. Due to their recent striking keen-ness, this is obviously quite a tense situation as to whether or not I will actually successfully make it back into the country by Monday. Lufthansa, you have been warned. Don't you dare.

Also, to the Queen, Princes William and Harry and to Kate Middleton, I have a reserved place on the Mall (I believe that this is your royal version of what us commoners would normally refer to as a front drive), so I would really quite appreciate it if you put in an appearance. Just saying...

Road to 2012

My mum and I recently went to an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery about the Queen. It consisted of photos and footage taken throughout her reign and, along with iconic artistic representations of her (such as those Roy Lichtenstein images), the exhibition documented her life through the decades.

We went to Matilda: The Musical in the West End shortly after going to the exhibition, and unfortunately didn't really have the time (nor the energy after Nadal's Wimbledon loss the night before!) to properly look around all of the Gallery, so I'd love to go back and take my time going around sometime (which is maybe not ideal during the hustle and bustle of the Olympics!). I'm hoping to at least manage to quickly go back there when I'm in London to look at the 'Road to 2012' exhibition which opened today, though.

After some extensive Googling (and it was pretty extensive, because all that Google seemed to want to tell me was that Kate Middleton went to the opening and wore an Olympic themed necklace), I managed to find out that the exhibition consists of pictures of althletes during their training sessions and also of their coaches and the people behind the Olympics, such as the local volunteer gardeners at Greenwich. I highly doubt that the badminton will be particularly well represented (if at all), however I have branched out to rowing in recent months and, from looking at previews of some of the photographs, it appears that it features quite heavily (this is probably due to the fact that Brits don't actually appear to be too shoddy at rowing).

Bearing in mind that the Queen and the Olympics are tied for 1st place in my mental list of favourite British things, I'm hoping that this exhibition will be just as good as the last one! (Dear Kate Middleton, you, your hubby and your brother-in-law are in a close 2nd place, so sorry for not dedicating this post to your necklace or Stella McCartney dress, but I promise to write about you properly if you turn up at the badminton. Hint. Hint. HINT).