Heart of Gold

Well, we did it. This city is going nuts right now after winning our first Gold medal on home soil. Congrats goes out to Alexandre Bilodeau capturing gold in mens moguls. So glad to finally break the ice; all of the dedication and hard work by the athletes has paid off. Heres to hoping it is only the start of a snowball affect. We watched some of the speed skating events in the Vogue theatre on a huge screen. The theatre was packed and the atmosphere was amazing when Groves won the Bronze.

As I'm sure you can imagine, now that we have arrived these blog posts will be less frequent - less frequent posts only means that we are having an amazing time and are too busy to write.

Last night we headed downtown Vancouver and to the Ontario House where we met up with fellow SPAD kids Imran Gill and Sean and Lawren Carroll. The place was very busy but worth waiting in a the Vancouver rain in line. Famous blues band Down Child played and were amazing. The lead singer fell in love with the girls - or maybe vice versa I'm really not sure. Dana wants everyone to know that she got a kiss on the hand. After drinking more than a few Ontario beer we left to explore other places around the area. The Quebec house had some Cirque de Sole acrobats, poutine, and very expensive beer. The Carrolls were staying on the other side of town so we split up for the night and we went for a walk down Granville to explore. I met up with my first cousin from Los Angeles, Julia who goes to UBC. Great to see her and we will probably meet up again this week before she goes to LA for reading week. We saw some amazing late night "buskers", including an amazing freestyle rapper who talked about everyone in the crowd and then sang Just a Friend by Bizmarkie. The downtown core was crazy, everyone singing "Oh, Canada", yelling GO CANADA GO, and just generally being loud, patriotic, and crazy.

The skytrain is a bit confusing here and we end up buying way more tickets than necessary - I think Corey ended up with 8 tickets just from the one night. I think maybe he was worried he might come up short.

We left downtown around midnight as we were all very wiped and still getting used to the time difference. Today we woke up around 9 and went down to the Cucumber Cafe in the hotel for breakfast. Then headed back down to Granville road to see what we didn't see at night - it was a beautiful day out; probably about 10 degrees outside. We saw street performers(Basketball Jones, Unicyclers), zip-liners going over the city, crazy people in full red body suits - just so many people. We walked so much today and we are all dusted right now and have no energy but we all know its a once in a lifetime experience so were going to suck it up.

Tonight we had a very romantic Valentines dinner at a local restaurant to start the night. We are back at the hotel now and we're going to go to the Richmond Ozone and the Heineken House to meet up with Imran and a few others.

Tomorrow Jarrod is going to meet up with his cousin and Nicole is going to the Island to meet a friend. Shanno, Corey, Dana and I are probably going to try to watch Canada's hockey practice in the afternoon. David Bedford of the COC is going to take us to the Canada House tomorrow night - look it up online. Should be an amazing night.