Yesterday Rhiannon and myself stayed up till midnight sewing. She was making a dress very similar to one worn by the character Daenerys in Game of Thrones. We had the alarms set for 6am this morning and were up and out the door to catch the 7am train to Sydney. There was a Game of Thrones exhibition on in the Museum of Contemporary Art. It was only on for three days and today was the final day. We had read reports of long queues at least 4 -5 hours long and we had a backpack of snacks to keep us going for as long as it took.
On the train to Sydney I had time to plait Rhiannon's hair into a style she had found on-line. When we arrived the queues were unbelievable. They snaked around the security barriers well past the "4 hours from here" sign. We stood in line and then were approached by girls who were much further ahead than us. They saw Rhiannon dressed up and were giving up on waiting and wanted to offer their space in the queue to us because of the effort they could see Rhiannon went to. We chatted to the people around us in our new queue position and found out that they had been queuing since before 8am knowing the exhibition opened at 10am.
Over the coming hours we chatted and nibbled on snacks and watched excitedly as more and more people joined the queue. The exhibition was open till 8pm and we wondered how much of the day it would take before we would be able to get in?
Imagine our disappointment when, close to midday, the line was officially closed about 100 people ahead of us. The staff had worked out the numbers in the queue and knew that the maximum amount of people were in line to get through before closing time. There were some very upset people especially as a few people in the official queue had skipped ahead to get their place. We talked about waiting outside in the hope that the queue may be re-opened as the first few thousand people got through. When the staff called the police to help with crowd control we knew we would have to give up. It just wasn't worth it.
It was a quiet train ride home. The mornings excitement had been replaced by frazzled nerves and the tiredness of the late night and early start were beginning to show. We thought through all the "what if's"
What if we had got up an hour earlier?
What if we had slept overnight like the people at the front of the queue were rumoured to have done?
In the end we tried to make the best of the half-adventure that we had experienced.
The next morning we read the news reports saying the people who were at the end of the official queue had queued for over 10 hours and then got turned away because the museum had closed their doors. We were glad then that we had walked away when we did.
Not quite the day we were hoping for but at least we tried.
