Olympic Field Day

I spend the bulk of my days in a little room with a computer, a phone and a loaded bookshelf and I don’t mind the isolation—in a lot of ways, I thrive in it—but I figure if you want a field day, make it a good one.

So, I went to Vancouver. So did a gazillion other people from Vancouver Island. The ferry was so full of foot passengers (most of us knew better than to take a car) that a lot of people had to sit on the floor while the disembodied voice of a female ferry employee kept reminding patrons of the cafeteria to eat up and move out and let some hungry others in. The bus from Tsawwassen to Richmond was standing room only for the majority, and the line-up to get onto the recently-completed Canada Line was, oh, about a thousand or so. That was from just a few buses, and more were on the horizon. But I went to soak up Olympic atmosphere, and line-ups are part of it.

I got downtown about noon, grabbed a dark roast from Starbucks and sat outside the chain-link fence to observe the Olympic flame. If one wanted, one could line up to mount a platform with an unobstructed view of said flame; the wait was approximately 45 minutes, and the line was growing fast. I wandered away in the direction of Robson Street.

I meandered, people-watching. And what a lot of people there were to watch. Everyone looked happy. Volunteers were happy to provide information. Cops directing traffic looked happy. The screams of the people zip-lining over Robson Square sounded happy, in a rather extreme way. I took pictures of the crowds for my husband (who hates crowds and had refused to join me on this adventure), chatted with a few people and caught snippets of conversations in several different languages. Hundreds of people were waving little Canada flags or wearing big ones as capes. A couple of guys were hanging on a giant one:

Go, Canada, go!

Near the end of my day, I went to a brew pub and sat at the bar nursing a Lions Gate Lager as I admired a glorious view of Burrard Inlet and the North Shore Mountains. Then I walked a couple blocks west to join the queue for the Canada Line. It was, as I expected, a queue of Olympic proportions. But no one was complaining. Instead, we marveled at the sheer number of us, and how long our line was becoming, and how happy we were when it moved, which it did, surprisingly fast.

I leave you with a picture of sun-drenched crowds in Robson Square, taken from the third floor of—where else would I go to escape for a few moments?—a bookstore: