Been busy lately. Didn't take the time to write about the rest of my Olympic experience.
Here are the highlights...
Good weather graced Vancouver. I even got lightly sunburnt from walking in the warm winter sunshine of that city, which is normally rainy in February.
My friend from Montreal who wants to buy property in Vancouver arrived. We went to Toshi's together. The food is always good there and I suggested she try the oysters as they gave me a nearly religious experience the first time I had tried them there. Everything went well except that later that night, my friend discovered she is allergic to oysters. She ended up being all red, full of rashes and throwing up. At one point, it looked serious enough to consider a trip to the hospital. But once the food was out of her system, things got fine.
The next day, we both went to an Olympic hockey game. It was the men's semi-final, pitting the US against Finland. The Finns got their asses kicked real bad. In the first period, the Americans scored six goals. The Finns managed to score one in the last period. Not the most entertaining match ever. Nonetheless, I can now say I've attended an Olympic event! Later, the Finns would manage to get the bronze medal in hockey. Following the match, we walked around Vancouver and went to eat at Guu. I missed the atmosphere and food at this favorite place of mine.
Saturday night, I hung out with two friends from Montreal: Grace and Ling. The streets were filled with people. Although, because of the light drizzle, it wasn't as crazy as the previous night. One group of people was particularly funny. They were a hodge-podge of persons gathered through the encouragement of Decentralized Dance Party. They added to the general happy chaos reigning on the streets of Vancouver.
Another group of people who grabbed my attention was girls having a pajama party behind a shop's window. I'm guessing this was a kind of publicity stunt. A few people gave in to their voyeuristic instincts to look at pretty girls playing strip poker publicly. One guy next to me gave them something to look at, too. Yes; he whipped out his schlong and rubbed it against the window for all the ladies to see.
The following day - Sunday the 28th of February - was the most intense day of the Olympics. Not only was it a beautiful week-end day outside, but it was the day the US and Canada would face off for men's gold in hockey. I watched the match on TV (and I never watch any sport on TV). It was one of the best matches of the history of that sport. The teams were of comparable strength and skill; the action would constantly move from one end of the rink to the other; the score was always tight and the excitement more than palpable. Canada was leading 2 to 1, but after having swapped their goaler for an extra player on the ice, and 24 seconds before the end of the third period, the Americans managed to tie the score. The tension was really high. The game went into overtime and would be won by the first team to get a goal. Sydney Crosby, became Canada's national hero when he scored. The crowd entered in pure jubilation and the whole city, if not the whole country entered in a frenzy of pride en joy. The men on the American team looked like they were thinking about suicide. I can only imagine what they felt like, but they nonetheless gave a terrific performance.
If the streets of Vancouver had been crazy in the past weeks, it was nothing compared to what they were after Canada's win in men's hockey. I've never seen so many Canadian flags before. I've never heard so many people sing "O Canada" before. Vancouver was turned into a sort of Canaday Day party on steroids, with Halloween elements thrown in for good measure. People would climb lamp posts, would honk madly, would shout, sing and dance. Many were dressed in red, some actually wearing flags as their outfits. Some were costumed as athletes. Some didn't make any sense but were just damn funny (inflatable sumos, people on stilts, an East Indian playing the bagpipe, etc.) It was something to be seen and experienced.
I had dinner at Zakkushi on Denman that evening. I highly recommend this Japanese grill diner. After dinner, I just soaked in the energy from the joyous crowd until around midnight.
The next day, Vancouver was a lot more calm. The games were over and they had been quite eventful. Not only did they have the usual sport competitions, expressions of support and manifestations, but the also went further than usual on the dramatic side. For the first time in Olympic history, an athlete died while practicing his sport at a competition venue. Joannie Rochette, a figure skater, lost her mother days before her Olympic performance. As in a movie, that didn't stop her, but instead gave her that more reason to perform. And perform she did: beating her personal record, she managed to get a medal. Of course, during the games, countless records were broken. And so were the hopes of a Canadian athlete of finishing first in men's 50K cross-country skiing. After giving his best for nearly three hours, he finished second a mere two seconds behind the gold medalist. To fall behind by two seconds after giving yourself out to the point of breaking for three hours in front of the world has just got to be devastating. And that's how the American hockey team seemed to have felt after the most epic hockey game ever in which they lost the gold to Canada. But, one man's hell is another's heaven and Canada was given the sweetest win it could ever hope of getting. A perfect end to a brilliant streak of triumphs where Canada raked in 14 gold medals in total, the highest number ever won by a single nation in all the Winter Games. Hell, it even makes me feel patriotic to some extent and I normally can't be caught giving a damn about such vain things as national pride.
But all good things come to an end and I headed to the Pacific Central train station to catch a bus that would take me to Seattle, where I would take a plane back to Montreal. It reminded me of the time I lived in Seattle and would take the bus or train every week-end to Vancouver.
Crossing the border was made fun by our Korean-born bus driver. He told us that the Americans were too poor to buy garbage cans or to have toilets in the border post. He obviously was making fun of the Americans' ridiculous misplaced obsession with security. There was an American journalist sitting not too far from me and she was outraged to hear the guy talking like that. She insisted on letting people around her know that her country had enough money to buy garbage cans and hire people to pick their contents up. For a journalist, she didn't seem to have a firm grasp of sarcasm. The bus driver also told us that we couldn't take fruits into the US; not even banana peels or apple cores. He told us not to put banana peels or apple cores into the bus' garbage bags because the garbage bags was meant to cross the border with the bus. He said we had two choices: we could either eat our banana peels or declare them upon which the customs agents would confiscate them and eat them themselves. I should have given that driver a tip for making me smile that much. He's got the right attitude. To paraphrase the old adage: if life throws bananas at you, you make a banana split.
Once in Seattle, I visited my old workplace and saw my old amazon.com co-workers. After that, I went to Uwajimaya to buy Japanese plum wine to bring back home and I had dinner with Heng and Pathoum who came all the way from Everett to see me. Later, I took the fairly recently-built light rail train all the way to the airport and caught my flight back to Montreal.
Getting back to Montreal made me feel like I do when I visit second world countries. Compared to Vancouver, Montreal is dirty, aging, haphazard, poor and ill-mannered. Of course, it's not quite Paraguay, but I don't see anything holding me back to my hometown. What my trip to Vancouver made me fully realize is that I can remotely work from anywhere. So, after I take some more time to figure a few things out, I might just become a world rambler, a citizen of the Earth with no specific address who just roams the planet in search of adventure and making the most of what little time I have in this life.
