Monday 30.11.2015 – Opening ceremony

It’s the day of the opening ceremony, and a day off – or almost a day off. The organization had a meeting at 10.00 at the auditorium about what has to be done for the opening ceremony and for the competition. Moving things to the park, and building flag poles for the “team march” was for the opening ceremony, putting up the IT (weather station, webcams and internet) was for the competition.

I promised to help Wojtek with the flagpoles, but those weren’t at the airfield yet. So we had some time off and decided to do laundry before that. He showed me where the laundromat was, it’s quite close to our hotel, as everything is nearby in Narromine.

After laundry we went back to the airfield with Beryl, she brought the poles from Dubbo. Since the job required drilling to get the hooks on the wooden poles, I saw it was better to leave it to men and make myself useful in the kitchen and cook some lunch.

Also Neil, Brian and Arnie were fixing something of the electricity, and I got a feeling that it wasn’t going as easy as it should have been. I heard some strong language(!) coming from red faces. Hopefully they got it sorted out.

Cooking at the clubhouse

You know, the breakfast and lunch are usually based on bread here. As I like cooking, I try to invent something from the ingredients which are in the fridge for us to use, instead of fixing a jamon y queso sandwich every day – that’s ham and cheese sandwich if you didn’t know :-) And quite often I do get attention if I am cooking, today the attention came from cooking with garlic. I put just one glove of garlic in there, and quite many at the clubhouse was asking am I using garlic and how much did I put it in the food. It’s not that common scent here, garlic I mean. Also I get lot of attention when cooking something else than bread, there are some people who are interested to see the outcome. Rob (Moore) usually says “and it wasn’t that hard to cook, it took the same time as fixing a sandwich”. True. I am glad we have the kitchen and fridge full of things, since it seems like I miss the cooking.

Narromine pool

After the lunch I went to the Narromine pool – entrance fee is $4.00. There were Czechs, Aussies, Canada, some British, and I believe part of team New Zealand were there as well. And one Finn :-) So it was very international.

Clearly at one point school day was over, as the pool was crowded by yelling around 10 year old kids. They started talking with Ailsa, and she told them who we were. I was lying in the sun so I couldn’t see their faces, but I think they looked amazed when Ailsa told that she is a pilot and we all are from the airfield, they ouldn’t let Ailsa go, as they wanted to know more and just talk to her. Perhaps we have future pilots there. I saw them later at the opening ceremony, it was great that they came there.

Opening ceremony

Opening ceremony was quite short, official part lasted just little over an hour. First a brass band played Australian anthem and some music, then the teams were introduced. That was great actually, as Terry told some details of all pilots. There was supposed to be Hercules fly-by, but I was told that they had broken it on the last minute. What a shame. But there was enough program: few short speeches, a short aerobatic show, couple of aboriginal dance numbers and didgeridoo playing. The competition was opened by Troy Grant, the Deputy Premier of New South Wales, followed by speech of Bill McAnally, the Narromine Mayor and Ruth Carney gave the Australian tradition “Welcome to country” –speech. Welcome to country can be a speech, or dance or a short ceremony where local older person welcomes the visitors to their land. I hope I got this right.

Beryl told me that Narromine means “place for honey” in Aboriginal language and Dubbo means “red earth”. We have here three official flags up: FAI of course, flag of Australia and one flag with half of red and black and yellow circle on it, which is the Aboriginal flag.

But back to the opening ceremony: I haven’t heard aboriginal language before and it sounded quite funny in my ears, but it also sounded like quite simple language. I don’t know if that’s true or not. Perhaps someone will teach me the key words, like Hello and Thank you and Bye bye. Overall the opening ceremony was quite good, speeches weren’t not at all too long as they’ve been in some places, and there were everything you could have hoped for. Of course what it comes to shortness of the event, we Finns might be one of the efficient ones.

After the official program it was time to eat and socialize. There were few food vans selling fish and chips, chicken burgers, potato chips on a stick and hot dogs and soda. At eight we started transferring all the things back to the airfield.

FAI flag

I have to reveal one thing: the FAI flag didn’t go up, because of the flag pole failure. But it worked quite well despite of that. It wasn’t a surprise that the flag got “stolen” at one point, but Terry saw that and he said to the microphone: “you have been spotted, bring it back”. According to Annex Z you are not allowed to steal the flag earlier than during 24 hours before the closing ceremony. I heard that this organization – or Beryl actually – is prepared for that to happen.

After the official program it was time to eat, there were few food vans. I tried chicken burger and it was pretty good, tasted quite fresh. Then it was time go back to the hotel. We sat in the common room, talked and watched Start Trek with Wojtek and Pete before going to bed.