Vancouver 2010

It seems a little off-key to post this after John's posts about Haiti.  

We just got back from a few days in Vancouver and the Olympics, staying again with our friends the Masons.  "Going to the Olympics" is one of those things I never thought I would do, and certainly would not have if not for the Masons.  They got the tickets when they were only available to Canadians, last summer.  

We spent Saturday wandering around downtown Vancouver, one large and long party, many streets closed to cars, many pavilions and stages and a zip line high across a downtown square, lots of (not great) street theater, some intersections so jammed it took us ten minutes to get across.  We saw what Canadians call "the Cauldron," the Olympic flame, now more accessible to visitors.  Sunday we saw W's 1500 meter speed skating at a brand new place, The Richmond Oval, in a suburb.  Everyone is very friendly and welcoming, thousands and thousands of volunteers doing the ticket-taking, crowd management, directions.  Tuesday, we were back at the Oval, front row seats for the M's 10,000 meter speed skating, the exciting race in which a Dutch skater broke the Olympic record by over 7 seconds but was disqualified for a lane change violation.  He found out when he was right in front of us and threw his sunglasses away.

Monday we were headed to see the US-Sweden W's hockey semi-final game, at the hockey rink at the University of British Columbia an hour southwest of downtown.  Janet got into the car with a set of tickets she had picked up on the kitchen counter and told Bob Mason "you forgot the tickets," and he said "no I didn't" -- but he had picked up the wrong set of tickets, so we would have driven an hour to UBC and discovered we didn't have the right tickets.  Janet saves the day.  But...

We parked at a UBC garage (they had sent the 40,000+ students home during the Olympics) and leisurely strode across the campus with plenty of time to spare.  Got to the arena and one of those volunteers said "what game are you seing?"  Bob said "US-Sweden."  The volunteer said that game was downtown -- where there is no parking.  So we race-walked back to the garage, and on the way saw a few people with American flags headed the other way to the UBC rink.  Merri Mason said to one such couple who had come on a bus "you're going the wrong way," and Bob offered a ride downtown.  Janet and I talked to the couple and they were laughing: she lived in an apartment two blocks away from the downtown hockey arena (where the NHL Vancouver Canucks play) -- and had a visitors parking space!  So we gave them a lift, they gave us a parking spot and we all saw the game.  

More later, photos, too.  Irony: there was over a foot of snow on the ground in NJ when we left, four straight sunny days without a cloud in Vancouver with no sign of snow anywhere.  Rained the last day.  Big snowstorm in NJ the day we got back.  But an unforgettable experience in every way.  I kept saying "I'm not really here," but I was.