My Day With Liz

Okay, so full disclaimer, the title of this post may be a little deceiving.  I may not have spent the whole day with her, and I definitely didn’t call her Liz, but I actually did 100% see the Queen of England the other day.

In the beginning of January everyone at school got an email saying that the Queen was coming to visit the Fijian exhibit that our visual arts center is currently putting on (also as a side note, that same building was used as the kind of Batcave of the Avengers at the end of the last movie, so check it out).

Anyway, we all got this email, and reasonably the hype around campus in the weeks leading up to the visit was extreme.  It was strange, though, hearing the opinions of so many British people in regard to the Queen, as she is someone who they all grew up learning about so closely. In Canada she just always felt so far away.

We were told that she would be coming on Friday the 27th, but for security reasons we weren’t told exact times. So here’s how my day ended up going down.

I woke up (wow so exciting, please continue), checked my email, and found out that she would be at school around noon, so if we wanted to try and see her, we should be there around eleven. I had class from 9-10:50, so I had exactly 10 minutes to get down to the art building if I wanted to get a spot that wasn’t on the other side of the city (but to be honest I’m sure that people had started to go down there before eleven exactly).

My friends and I were able to worm our way through the crowd and actually managed to get a pretty good spot.  We stood outside in the cold for probably about two hours, my boots got so muddy somebody could have followed my steps all the way home, and my fingers were so cold that I'm pretty sure that they were defrosting for the rest of the day.

BUT was it worth it? You know it.

I saw the Queen with my own eyes, and with the lens of my camera, even if she only looked like a magenta spot in sea of police officers.  She wasn't actually out in public very long, literally only for the time it took her to get out of her car and into the building.  But to be honest that's okay with me because I never thought I would see her at all in my life, so 10 seconds is 10 seconds more than I thought I would get.

There she is, in all her colour coordinated glory.

-Sarah (Canadian Ambassador)