In any case, Day 2 of our trip took us to our first event: Women's Curling - Round Robin matches.
Jamie's so cute when he's super excited! This was the Vancouver Olympic Centre, where the curling events were held. Once the Olympics and Paralympics are done, they're going to take away the ice and turn the building into a community rec centre.
The mascots, Quachi and Miga, were on their way outside to greet people, but we managed to snap a quick shot of them before they left the building.
Some hard-core Japanese curling fans were sitting a few rows in front of us. Some of them had curling stones for hats, others had brooms for hats which ended up looking like mops, but give them an A for effort.
And some of them just had loud hats.
Here we go! Warm-up time begins now! I thought that it was funny that the first thing they do as part of the warm-up is to cool their sliders. Should they call the warm-up "cool-up" instead?
There are 4 games going on at the same time during round robin play, and the Canadians were on Sheet D playing Great Britain.
And here's Cheryl Bernard in action! Canada won their game that day, so the hubby was happy.
After the curling match, we did some shopping for Olympic gear before meeting up with my cousins for dinner. We went to Tojo's, which is an amazing Japanese restaurant with arguably the best sushi you will ever have outside Japan (and maybe even better than some places in Japan). According to their menu, we learned that Hidekazu Tojo, the restaurant's owner and head chef, is one of the inventors of the California Roll, which is named after the locale of its unique ingredient (avocado), and not where it was created. I looked on Wikipedia about this, and he's not mentioned, so who knows.Whether he did help invent it or not, there was no denying that Tojo's has amazingly delicious food.
We then convinced my cousin to drive us past Cole Harbour to look at the Olympic Rings there. Ashley McIvor had just won gold in ski cross earlier that day, so the rings were coloured a beautiful gold.
The rest of the trip went by pretty quickly. In the days following, we spent one day doing nothing because I needed some time to rest, then another day downtown to see if we could get some more tickets to other events (no luck there), were late for family dinner with my aunts, uncles, and cousins because we wanted to watch the end of the gold medal women's hockey game at a bar downtown, saw Great Big Sea in concert (and they are SO amazing live), and watched the Canadian men's curling team take the gold. That was an incredible experience, and being in the building with everyone singing Oh Canada was something else. We saw Stephen Harper, Donald Sutherland, Mike Babcock, Tracy Wilson, and a few well known Canadian curlers in the audience, which was pretty neat. Guess Canadians really do love their curling.
And then it was back on the plane to head home just in time to watch the men's gold medal hockey game and then the closing ceremonies. This is definitely one Olympic games that I'm going to remember. Thanks Vancouver for all the great memories!!
