Opening Ceremony (and Shopping)

Out and about in Vancouver on Friday. Lots of street art and decorated buildings. There are numerous pedestrian plazas and people are starting to gather and take photos of each other as they cavort in the streets. We see many brightly colored jackets from different teams. There are large men walking around wearing signs hanging from their necks that say "Tickets Wanted-Buy or Sell". Not sure I'd want to deal with them, as they look scary.

Lantern Forest-paper lanterns decorated by children and lit up at night. Hudson's Bay Co. store in background to the right.
Canadian spirit is everywhere!

We walked up to the Hudson's Bay Company store where the Official Olympic Superstore has taken over about half of the first floor. We had to wait in line to get in, and once in, my goodness, so much to buy....A logo can be put on just about anything!
This is not my bag!

The hot item at this Olympics are the red mittens, worn by the torch bearers. In Salt Lake, the USA beret was the hot item. People were scooping up mass quantities of the mittens. We left the store after trying to see everything and figuring out which was the shortest checkout line. The person ahead of me spent $1941.00, so the lines were quite lengthy.

We were hungry after shopping and ended up at George/Brix Restaurant. On the Hamilton St. level, the lounge is George, but on the Mainland St. level the restaurant is Brix. Same kitchen. Excellent crab cakes there. I had the Caesar Salad with chicken (no dressing).
Later in the afternoon, we watched the Olympic torch finish it's run through the city. We were able to stand on the street in front of our condo building, so that was easy.
The Opening Ceremony was at BC Place, an indoor arena. We had seats in the balcony at the far end of the stage. Everyone got a box shaped like a drum with items in it for the audience participation segments. We got trained in using the flashlights and electric candles and we had to wear a paper poncho so that the lighting effects could be seen. If you watched the ceremony on TV and saw that the different flags were arrayed over the audience, that was the lighting effect. We used the box like a drum when the athletes paraded into the arena. During the k.d.lang song the electric candles were supposed to light up row-by-row from the bottom to the top, but people didn't follow directions very well.
Team Macedonia, one of the teams with very few members.
We really enjoyed the special effects, although I'm sure some of them looked better on TV. IT was a very long show, but the musical numbers really got the crowd going. There was a nice tribute to the luger that was killed in a training run. The athlete's parade is the best.

Team USA entering the arena.
It was an amazing experience to be in the audience for an event that I've watched so many times on TV. Afterwards, we walked to a nice fusion-type restaurant called Regional Tasting Lounge (rtl) for dinner, but it was very late and we probably weren't in the mood for such fancy/different food. It was also raining pretty hard after the event, so we did get quite wet walking to dinner.
We all received a card for this digital souvenir project, so I'm sharing it with you.

Thanks for all the comments! And more photos on Flickr soon!