Once I was the King of Sweden..Now I eat Humble Pie

Royalty - what a life! I could have named this post "From Russia with Love" as well as you will learn...

Yep, today I finally got a new post and what a posting it was. Today I was at the Guest Pass Centre where all of the guests to the village must enter by picking up the appropriate accreditation. In order to do so, they must be accompanied by an accredited person to enter, they must leave their passport with the accreditation folks and must leave the village no later than 9pm in order to retrieve their passports.

So the posting is quite interesting with lots of VIP people, media and athletes passing through here.

The evening started with quite a lot of hullabaloo as the head volunteer honcho guy came in to brief us all that the King of Sweden was arriving by motorcade at around 4:30pm. Just prior to 4:30 quite a few plain clothes CSIS security started arriving as did the Village photographer and several other VANOC people to greet the king. Sure enough right at 4:30 a motorcade of about 6 black SUVs with flashing lights on the front came driving into the driveway and lots of security RCMP/CSIS guys jumped out along with the King dressed in Team Sweden gear. They whisked him through security and through our post and into the village in no time.

About a half hour later I had an interesting encounter with a very burley Russian man. He was in his 60s I would say, a huge man, very sullen. He tried to pass through my post. As I scanned his accreditation it came up red on my computer screen which means that he is denied entry. He looked flustered at me as I told him he wasnt allowed to enter. He grumbled something in Russian to me and pulled out his cel phone and started calling people. After about 10 minutes of calling he finally left and headed back to Sochi House. He retured about 1 1/2 hours later. I once again scanned his accreditation and it still came up 'red' so I denied him access. I told him "No Access" he responded in a deep Russian accent - "No Access"! He grumbled a bunch more and pulled out his cel phone and began speaking with someone. Then he passed me the phone to speak to the person on the other end. It was a very polite girl who spoke perfect english who asked me nicely if I could just let the man pass. Of course, being the good blue jacket volunteer, I explained that he wasnt allowed to pass without permission. She said that she was giving permission and I kindly replied that I dont know who she is and what her position was and that only my superiors could grant permission for someone to pass. The girl on the phone said she would make some calls and get back to us. About 10 minutes later we get a call from Frederica our boss who grants permission for the Russian man to pass. Afterwards she explained to us that he is the Russian Minister of Sport in charge of the Sochi Olympics in 2014!! Oh well, we take our jobs seriously I guess.

The day went by quickly. During my lunch break I headed over to the ticketing office to see if there were any tickets for events available and I lucked out.

Some of the athletes who purchased tickets are selling the tickets through this office so they post signs up by the desk with the details of the tickets, prices and dates. All of them are being sold at face value with no service fees so it is better than buying from scalpers.

I notice 1 ticket for women's speed skating 5000m at the Richmond Oval tomorrow. I absolutely love speed skating and this was one event that I really wanted to see so I purchased that ticket. Then I noticed 2 tickets for womens semi final curling for Thursday so I purchased those two tickets.

So now I am actually going to see some events.

So with that luck I ended my evening excited about the coming two days off as I get to take in some events. We were dismissed from the job at 9:30 which was nice and I headed home on the long trek on the SkyTrain to the Gomorra of BC aka Surrey Central SkyTrain Station. This place is hell. Nothing but drug dealers, gangsters, scumbags - a really lovely place to wait for a bus at 11pm!

Oh how I love Armstrong!