A while back I had bought tickets to the Sainsburys Anniversary Games, which was held over this past weekend to celebrate the first anniversary of last year's Olympic Games. Friday and Saturday formed part of the IAAF Diamond League in the British Athletics Grand Prix, and then Sunday was dedicated to showcasing the Paralympic champions of 2012. I'd bought tickets to both the Friday night and the Saturday afternoon, with Noel and Luke joining us on the Saturday only. So after work on Friday I met up with Uns at Stratford, grabbed a bite to eat then made our way into the stadium. After not being back to the stadium for an entire year since the Olympics, Friday was the second time in six days we'd been back, with last week been Uns' charity run there. We had bought decent tickets for the Friday night so had seats in the lower tier in line with the 200m starting blocks, so certainly got a good view on all the evening's action. Among all the action-packing athletics and the GB women winning the 4x100m relay, the highlight of the night was definitely the finale and watching Usain Bolt run the 100m sprint in a season best time of 9.85 seconds. Following on from his win, he then did a victory lap around the stadium soaking up the atmosphere in front of the sold out crowd.

Edit: I've somehow manage to lose all my photos I took at the athletics on both the Friday and Saturday - no idea how that happened so I'll just have to post the above photo I found online. Still trying to work out how that happened...

Yesterday we were back for round two of the athletics, this time it was myself and Uns as well as Noel and Luke. We met up in Stratford again and grabbed a pizza from Franco Manca which are well known for their pizzas down in Brixton Market. They've clearly expanded and now got a few branches around town. After eating we headed into the stadium and this time we'd gone for the cheap-seats higher up in the upper tier, but I almost think the atmosphere was better up there compared to the crowd around us on Friday who were rather dull and never seemed to get into the spirit of things at all. The highlights of the day was seeing Jessica Ennis-Hill in the long jump, the Frenhman Renaud Lavillenie in his pole vault world record attempt of 6.16m as well as Mo Farah in the 3,000m where he broke away and destroyed the field with a devastating final lap as he came home in a personal best time, some five seconds ahead of second place. Final race of the day involved Usain Bolt and the Jamaican team winning the 4x100m relay. Certainly a good day of track and field events, with a free big names as well!

Edit: I've somehow manage to lose all my photos I took at the athletics on both the Friday and Saturday - no idea how that happened so I'll just have to post the above photo I found online. Still trying to work out how that happened...

It took us a while to get out the stadium, so we figured we'd head around and check out the Open East Festival which was running over the weekend and was to celebrate the first anniversary of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park opening to the public. They had put together a decent line up of music, artists, performers and food throughout the weekend. We never had tickets and thought we'd pick up from the box office, but as it turned out both Noel and Fish decided to leave then and two separate groups of people gave us a spare ticket each, so managed to get into the festival in their tickets - bonus! We figured we'd go in, check it out and didn't have to hang around if it wasn't great. After grabbing a beer each we stopped in at the Moulin Rouge tent to watch some weird show that I wasn't too sure of. Quite entertaining though! After the show we made our way to the music tent to watch the end of an African band, Seun Kuti & Egypt 80, followed by The Waterboys, an Irish band from Dublin. By this time the rain was bucketing down which was fine since the band were playing under cover, the problem came when needing another beer and we had to trek across the muddy fields in shorts and flip flops. Good fun indeed! Then once The Waterboys were done playing, we headed back to Westfield for food and stopped in at Cabana Brasilian Barbecue for a burger and some Prosecco, before making our way home.

We had no set plans for today and figured it the weather was nice in the evening we'd just stay local and hook up the braai for dinner. This morning we took a walk into Peckham for coffee at Mouse Tail Coffee Stories which is a regular coffee stand set up in front of Peckham Space. From there we headed down the high street, picked up a few things for dinner then headed back for the afternoon. The rest of the day was just spent around the house, avoiding the mid afternoon downpour, and then once it has nicely cleared up we sat outside and had a braai for dinner. Certainly a good end to the weekend.