The Scope

I’ve been in Vancouver for a couple days now and one thing is for sure: my feet hurt. A lot.

I walk to one attraction, walk around it, then walk to another. Then I rinse and repeat until I fall over. I eat while walking and send text messages while walking (into a pole.)

My goal for this week was to suck up as much free entertainment as I could. Yes, I could pay a thousand dollars on the official ticket scalping website (they call it fan-to-fan selling, but potato-potato) to see an hour and a half of ice dancing, but then I’d only have one arm and one leg remaining. So with guides in tow, I head to a attractions that looks … attractive … then I’ll see the enormous line and head to the next one.

Many such free attractions are at pavilions sponsored by the various provinces or countries. Last night I ventured to the B.C. Pavilion. They have taken over Robson Square, where you can watch performances on a number of stages, watch the Olympic events on a big screen, or ice skate on a Rockefeller-Center-like rink. And all for free.

This is not the skating rink where the ice dancing takes place

What attracted me, however, was the zip-line. You can zip-line across a couple downtown city blocks. That’s something you can’t do everyday (legally) so I eagerly searched for the queue. Then I saw the following sign:

Wait seven hours for a 20-second zip-line

Seven hours? What’s British Columbian for “no, thank you”? (To be fair, the wait wasn’t quite seven hours when I was there, but it still extended long past my bed time.)

On my way out I caught the tail-end of a performance that seemed to have drawn a decent crowd. I want to say he was a juggler, but I couldn’t be certain because I didn’t see him juggle anything. I only saw his finale in which he got a man from the crowd to, um, stand on him. Uh, bravo?

I left there and, after waiting about half an hour to buy a sandwich, made my way to the Olympic cauldron. (That’s the big fiery thing if you were, like me, unsure why there would be an Olympic soup pot.) Mercifully, this was something you could see without waiting in line, as long as you didn’t mind peering through a chain-link fence. They actually responded to complaints last week and moved the chain link fence closer to the cauldron. Hey, there’s a good idea. Let’s let the crowd get closer to the giant open flames.

The Olympic Cauldron

After that I walked home, apologized to my feet and called it a night.