Vancouver 2010

There are SOME perks to living in Washington state! I always loved watching the Olympics when I was a kid. For the summer Olympics I was fascinated with gymnastics and for the winter games I loved watching ice skating. Something about the fact that I will never in my life be able to do anything remotely close to what these athletes do seems to catch my attention. I can barely ice skate in a straight line and I've never been able to master a cartwheel, so I get my joy from watching others do the things I only wish I could do!

Since Vancouver is practically in my backyard (I live closer to Vancouver than I do to Seattle), I decided that when the Olympics arrived here I would have to find a way to go see them.

I managed to get tickets to the first round of ice dancing and I was thrilled! I wanted to go to the Olympics and I would have taken any tickets that I could get, but since ice skating was always my favorite thing to watch I was thrilled to end up with tickets to see this event live!

So on Friday, February 19, I headed off to Vancouver. Mr. V had to work, and while I know he wanted to check out the Olympics in general, I don't think he was too upset to miss ice dancing. Since he had to work, he passed his ticket along to a friend of mine and the 2 of us went off to have some fun. After a fairly easy border crossing (the easiest one I have experienced, which was odd since I would think that during the Olympics security would be tighter), we stopped at the British Columbia visitor's center to get some maps and information. This was probably the smartest move we made because Vancouver wasn't letting people drive and park downtown. We had to park in the town of Surrey and take the Skytrain into Vancouver. Since I didn't even know that the town of Surrey existed, the visitor's center was definitely a smart move.

The first thing we did was head off to the waterfront to see the Olympic torch (which is being called a cauldron for some reason). Amazingly, Vancouver has this entire thing under control. The crowds in the city were insane, but I am completely amazed at how well they have the crowds managed. I never felt like I was in a huge unruly crowd, and volunteers in blue jackets were set up everywhere to direct people around to keep traffic moving. I guess I was expecting pure bedlam, but we got the exact opposite.

After the torch, we had to head to the Pacific Coliseum to see the ice dancing. We had an amazing time! We got to meet some of the ice dancers and get their autographs and we got a big kick out of the excitement that the Canadians were radiating off of them. At one point I had to say "Wow I've never seen so many Canadians!" I know, I know. We were in Canada, so obviously there were Canadians everywhere, but what I meant was that everywhere we looked we saw red. It seemed like every single person was dressed in something red, something that had a maple leaf on it, or something that said Canada. The fact that it was all red is what I think stood out the most. We could look down a street and just see a sea of red everywhere and when the Canadian ice dancers preformed, the crowds watching went insane!

By the time the event was over we had to head back to Washington. However, we realized that there was still a lot of stuff in the city that we had wanted to see, so we made plans to come back on Sunday. So on the 21st, my friend and I collected our husbands and the 4 of us went back to check out more of the sights. We definitely had fun and for once I'm happy to be living out here because I'm not sure that I would have ever experienced this if I was living anywhere else!

I posted my pictures from the weekend on Facebook, and I'm going to try to post them here. I've never tried to use the public link to pictures on Facebook before, so I'm not completely sure this will work, but instead of creating a whole new album for the sake of this blog, I'm going to try it. If you find yourself clicking on the link and its not working, please let me know!

I just have a simple point and click camera, but my friend has an amazing professional type camera so her pictures turned out much better than mine. I didn't even bother trying to take pictures of the ice dancers because I knew they would come out small and blurry with my camera. She took tons of pictures though so I'm going to try to get the public link to her Facebook album (which she has to give me access to - I can't just get it myself) and then I'll post her pictures too. For now though, here are my pictures.

Olympics - Vancouver 2010