Downtown at the Olympics

The Olympics are in town, but I haven't gone to do much Olympic stuff and I don't feel like fighting the crowds to get into something. I'm not interested enough to put much effort into it. However, free stuff that has no line up, I'll check it out. So yesterday, I took transit downtown after work. In preparation, I browsed through some reviews of the various pavilions and houses. It seems like people are complaining that there isn't much to do. I get it. Usually if you wait in a line, you get to see a show, or you go on a ride at an amusement park, or something. People wait in line an hour, invest their time, they expect something. So, I can see people complaining, but I'm not going to set my self up for that kind of disappointment. I'm going for stuff that's free, and has no line up. So, getting out from Waterfront Station, I walked the block up to Canada's Northern house. Zero line-up. Good stuff. There was a lot of artwork in there. Displays with various animals like muskox, polar bear, etc.


They had a little stage and there were some performances there. When I was there, there was a dance done to drums. There was a short line up for a booth where you could email out a video of yourself. I didn't really bother because again my thing is, I'm trying not to line up for anything at all. At one point, I had to go to the washroom, but just on principle, I was not going to wait in that line. Ok, that part's not true, but yeah, the mission of the night, not lining up for anything. Met up with a friend and walked through the place again.

After that, we went up a few blocks to the Royal Canadian Mint Pavilion. It seems like there's some buzz about this because you can actually touch some Olympic medals. We did see a line outside for this. It wasn't ridiculously long, but still kind of long and it's a line-up. I didn't want to spend a large chunk of the night waiting in line. However, there's another room in the pavilion, The Gold Room. If you were going to The Gold Room there was no line up, so in we went. They had a 100kg gold, million dollar coin.



They also had a gold brick that you can pick up. Now I already started trying to think of some Ocean's 11 type scheme wherein we could steal this brick, but it was attached by a thick chain. There's no getting past that.



After that I didn't really know what else to go see. We went around Robson Square and the art gallery to see if there was anything there. The zipline was closed. Ended up running into some friends and went to meet some other friends at the Bread Garden on Granville. The rest of the night was spent wandering around not really doing much, but just soaking in the festive spirit of the Olympic atmosphere. As one of my friends said, it's like Canada everyday for two weeks. I did end up waiting in line for one thing though. It wasn't a long wait, but I spent a couple minutes waiting for some poutine at Fritz. Now, I don't mind waiting for something if it's going to be worth the wait. Poutine at Fritz, you know that's going to be worth it.