Educational. Interactive . and/or slightly illegal.

hurray for reading break. I have gone downtown more times this week than I have probably ever gone in my lifetime. The city has seriously been transformed by the olympics. The venues for free concerts and shows are amazing and watching events on a big screen with a thousand other canadians surrounding you is something to be experienced. It doesn’t matter if it’s a men’s hockey game or women’s curling, when you’re with a crowd of people cheering for the same team every sport becomes the best sport in the world.

Outside of the Olympics, Vancouver is typically a busy city, but it’s everyone busy in their own worlds. The skytrains are usually silent going from destination to destination but now they’re filled with excited chatter and spontaneous break-outs of “Oh Canada” — and even though it’s usually led by drunken fanatics adorning maple leaf capes and singing horribly off key, it’s fantastic. As cheesy as it sounds, there is something utterly and undeniably infectious about the spirit of the olympics. It’s taken years to get to this point but Vancouver has come alive. Strangers are striking up conversations with people they’ve never met before; adults are laughing at jokes teenagers make on busses and trains. I guess the truly exciting news is something that’s so simple and yet so indescribably profound.

People are people in public again.

********************************
and now for some photos of last week’s target. I’ll be honest here, the target’s description was ridiculously…ridiculous. I tried to find guys wearing purple and drinking coffee but i realized that unless I actually staked out coffee shops for hours on end, the task was going to be pretty difficult. Unfortunately, during the olympic festivities, I only managed (or remembered) to find one guy bearing the description. Fortunately I took multiple pictures of him. And by “multiple” I mean three. so here you are: photos of the target and a small sample of the Olympics in Vancouver