Day 1 - Opening ceremony

So today was the first official day of the IOI. I began the day by waking up to a nuclear siren going off, our alarm for the next 7 days. After recovering from the shock, and having a quick shower where privacy comes after economy, me and Evgeny went to the breakfast hall and had breakfast with the English. We then met Bernard while heading back to our rooms, who instructed us to wake the others up and get them dressed in their blazers, so that we could catch a bus instead of walking. We decided to neglect the detail that there was multiple buses, so Kenneth and Robert had fun rushing up to breakfast only to find that there was no real need.

The opening ceremony itself was quite good. They began by having a Canadian Celtic band play, who were quite good. Then they replaced it with multiple people welcoming us to the IOI in different languages, and finally the main organiser, Troy, spoke for a while about the importance of this in our lives. Then a trick/comedy duo performed, which was slightly entertaining, but clearly pitched to a different audience. After this, we were entertained by cheerleaders, which again was quite awkward and we the audience did not appreciate maybe as much as others would have. Finally, a boy archipelago group sang several songs, which was easy to listen to.

After the ceremony, Robert was interviewed by Canada National Television, and showed his true bogan side to them. We also got Peter Taylor, the head of AMT, to have an intimate time with the cheerleaders, as can be seen in some of the photos. After this, we headed back to the university, for lunch and the practise session.

For lunch, the queue was incredibly long, meaning we were almost late to the practise session. In the session, we played tetris and minesweeper, printed off documents with the text "Please hand to the hottest guy in the room". The problems presented we had all seen before, meaning me and Evgeny got off to a perfect start to the IOI, hopefully a good sign for tomorrow.

After the problem session, we went and had some dinner as we were all incredibly tired, and so afterwards played a bit of Bartog before meeting with Bernard to discuss the final changes before the leaders went into quarantine. During this the Internet was shut down, which is why this is posted the day after it had all happened.