Winter Olympics Day 2: Sunday, February 14

This day was really amazing...our first full day here. As it turns out, Vancouver has the second biggest Chinatown in North America (after San Francisco) and by wild coincidence, we were going to be in town on the day of the Chinese New Year's parade and the time of the parade was moved to early in the day to accomodate Olympic events, so the planets aligned and we could attend it! One of our hosts, Holly & her son Will accompanied us to the parade. We got there just as it was starting and had a front row spot!

It was an amazing parade that lasted about an hour (we were even ready for it to be done by the end...). Lots of people were handing out lucky money envelopes with candy inside and other goodies to the people along the parade route. Rachel Claire got about 15 of these! There were some amazing lion dancers, dragons, tigers and other participants wearing beautiful Chinese outfits. Rachel Claire also got a balloon, and some lucky money from the Mayor of Vancouver who is quite cute! Several photographers (video & print) wanted to take a picture of her but she was quite shy about that.

After that, we walked (a few short blocks but what seemed like a lifetime for Rachel Claire who wasn't up to walking that day) to a lovely little coffee shop for a snack and a drink. Got to see a neat neighborhood along the way.

Later in the day we headed to figure skating -- the event Rachel Claire was the most excited about. I was just getting my bearings about how to utilize public transport and did not expect to run into a march commemorating women who had been killed in East Vancouver at the bus stop...which delayed us quite a bit. I was getting a bit nervous about getting there on time...but as it turned out, we got to our seats just as the figure skating was about to begin! We had a bit of a struggle walking from the bus stop to the arena, including a serious frisking at the security (luckily they didn't discovery any of my hidden food staches!).

I was almost in tears during the figure skating. It was amazing to finally be at the Olympics, with Rachel Claire sitting on my lap, enthralled by the figure skating. A Chinese pair skated first which was super cool for us too. We also got to see a French pair that we had seen practice here in Indy (they live and train here -- we saw them in December when we went skating at Pan Am Plaza). Figured out how to turn off the flash on my camera so I could safely take pictures without getting scolded by the ubiquitous volunteers. We had great seats -- middle of the rink, aisle seat. It was simply awesome!! You can see the results here.