The Olympics were awesome.
Jason and I drove up to Vancouver on Monday to my friend Sarah and her sweetie’s home. (Unlike all those suckers who waited in long border crossing lines on the weekend, we breezed through.) They were fabulous hosts and we had a lot of fun with some geeking out. I made these chocolate soufflé cupcakes with mint cream as they are gluten-free for Sarah and the cupcakes were a delicious hit. We went out to awesome Thai food that night and explored some of the highlights of Vancouver Olympic Nightlife. Including standing in a large crowd watching ice dancing and everyone getting emotional. (Jason and Brad were so stoic.)
The next day, we got up early and I was a bad guest who can’t handle the morning and black tea on an empty stomach and got sick. Fail. But I was all better by the time Jason and I trudged off to find the bus to take us to Curling! We just followed the masses to the arena.
And to our complete surprise, we had 1st row tickets! Like you had to be banging a curler or disabled in order to get better seating. We saw Canada vs China (Canada killed them); Norway vs Great Britain (Norway had fabulous pants); Sweden vs Denmark; and Switzerland vs France (they were closest to us). It was awesome and a lot of fun. We drank overly expensive crappy Canadian beer and tried not to yell “Sweep.” (It’s rude to yell while the stones are moving as the players need to hear each other.) I did find it interesting that a lot of non-English speaking teams’ skips mixed their native language and English while making calls.
Some lovely older Canadian women tried to explain curling to us, until we informed them that we knew all about it and had even played it before. They said we could be honorary Canadians for the day. I was also amused by the guy next to me over explaining curling to his 10-year-old daughter when she asked questions. She got on her cell at one point and informed whoever was on the other line that curling “was kind of interesting, but boring.” Adorable.
Then Jason and I went to forage for food near the hockey arena. We ended up eating sushi and watching Canada destroy Russia in hockey. (Poor Ovechkin!) There were a few very loud guys yelling every time Canada scored. We were afraid sushi chefs were going to lose fingers.
We then went to see the Slovakia vs Norway hockey game. It was awesome. Again, I was surprised that we had 5th row tickets. We were to the left of the player’s benches. There were some crazy puck bunnies (hockey fangirls) trying to get the Slovakian players to notice them by throwing themselves as the players during warm-ups.
Only six minutes into the game, one of the Slovakian players was checked to the head and neck and went down. The EMTs came out and hauled him away. And then they cleaned the blood off the ice. It was weird because no one said anything over the announcements the entire time; even after, they only ever announced the penalty the other guy got.
Anyway, the rest of the game was great. It was 3-3 until the 3rd period when Slovakia scored another goal to win it. The crowd was going nuts the entire time. Though it was funny how people cheered for almost everyone or, you know, waved their Canadian flags. Slovakia was definitely the better team, overall. Two or three pucks ended up flying over the glass into our area and then at the end, a player tossed a stick and three rather large men fought over it. The guy who got it’s girlfriend was embarrassed by his behavior.
Oh, hockey, you are awesome sport.
If the photos weren’t enough, there’s video too. Video I took on my phone. Curling is so much easier to video than hockey.
We had a great time, lovely hosts, and everything went pretty smoothly. Winston missed us a lot.
