Devin's Diary: Day Two

Sometimes, a quick morning run down by Commercial Drive takes a little longer than you might expect. Today, we received a friendly reminder that while most people have come to Vancouver in the spirit of the games, there remains a group of people willing to prey upon inattentive tourists like us. Sometime within a 20 minute time frame a shifty character managed to lift Maeghan’s iPhone, and eventually made contact with me on my phone requesting a ransom. When we assumed the Vancouver City Police would be relatively helpless to assist, we were overwhelmed by the rapid response of two plain-clothes officers in the area who took my place in the arranged meeting with the extortionist, which eventually lead to an arrest of a guy who fled from the scene leaving Maeghan’s iPhone and a can of pepper spray in his wake. Frankly, we were more shocked by the rapid, efficient and ultimately successful efforts of the Vancouver City Police than we were by the boldness of the extortionist: Vancouver Police deserve gold in our minds!

As a result of the extortion fiasco, we missed an early afternoon curling match we were slated to attend, but it turns out Kevin Martins managed to end that game early with a monster score. Instead, we headed downtown to the heart of the Olympic action around False Creek into Yaletown, Robson Streets and Granville Street. The Saskatchewan pavilion was, once again, lined-up for a distance. The Metro (free paper) this morning reported that the Saskatchewan pavilion was one of the hot spots in town, which was confirmed by one of the fine Vancouver City Police constables we dealt with who advised he had heard the Saskatchewan pavilion was the place to be.

The roaming crowds from Yaletown to Granville and Robson were intense and high spirited. On this un-seasonally warm Friday night, it seemed like every residential tower within eyeshot must have emptied its human occupants onto the streets of Vancouver to flood the town with positive human energy. Perhaps, the most peculiar experience of the day (aside from the cell phone extortion), was our sojourn into The Olympic Superstore, the secure store-within-a-store carved out of the main floor of the Hudson Bay Company on Granville and Georgia. The Superstore had the sidewalk and half the adjacent street down one entire block fenced-off to house two lines managed by a team of security guards who metered people into the temple of official merchandise like Hollywood royalty into the latest club. It was, perhaps, more intense inside the store than it was outside on Granville with the drunken hooligans. Racks of official Canada hoodies hardly cleared the storage room doors before people ravaged the rolling racks like starving scavengers, causing the tireless Bay employees to beg for order with limited success.

It was an odd day, but a memorable one. Tomorrow, we’ll try something different by starting our day with a 9:00am curling match: surely the extortionists and the hooligans are still in bed at 9:00am. And good stuff John Montgomery – a prairie boy wins gold!

Guest post from U of S Alumnus Devin Dubois