Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics

I can’t believe the Olympics are over.  For seventeen days, Vancouver was the most coveted city in the world, and with good reason.  The place was absolutely nuts.

It started out a little rough with the epic torch-to-cauldron fail, enhanced by Wayne Gretzky’s fail-face.  Then there was the poorly planned chain-link fence around the cauldron in coal harbour.  Not to mention the tragic death of the Georgian athlete, the vandalising mob that bashed in the Bay windows and terrorized random people on the street, or the general “resist 2010″ groups.

Fine.  Money could be better spent than on the Olympics. However, Canada is a nation of people who identify with their homelands first.  FRENCH-Canadians, INDO-Canadians, CHINESE-Canadians.  People in Vancouver are the worst for this.  Either they’re over-psyched to be from Vancouver and eat a lot of granola, playing frisbee on Wreck Beach, or they’re like, yeah I g u e s s I’m from Vancouver.

For the first time ever, people were stoked to be from Vancouver, to live here, to be visiting here.  Canadians were stoked to be Canadians.  And in the week following the Olympics, the flags are still flying, people are still wearing their mittens and hoodies.

Anything that brings so many people together in such a monumental way, that isn’t mass genocide, is a good thing as far as I’m concerned.