Action packed day - last day of our Olympic fun (Feb. 22)

On our last full day in Vancouver we went to two events - both women's hockey games.  The first game was USA v. Sweden.  Not surprisingly it seemed like all the Canadians in the house were rooting for Sweden.  Even the fan sitting next to us, who let us take a photo of her removable tattoo:

 

This tattoo is so much better than flags - it's the player herself!  Our seats were pretty good, and this time I opted for a third-party photographer instead of the Liss holding the camera with us hoping we're in the frame.

 

One of the crazy things about this game is the head of our refs for our Burlington League, Mary-Anne, was officiating.  You can see her in the USA goal photo.

 

  

(that's her with her back to us)

We had time to kill between games so we went to Granville Island to seek out some food and diversion.  We ended up at Tony's Fish & Oyster Cafe. Liss opted for the fish & chips.

 

And I couldn't leave Vancouver without having oysters, so I went for the Kushi - yum!

 

  

(okay, I had a couple of bites of Liss' fish as well as a few of her chips.)

Sure, Granville Island was catering to all the tourists brought in by the Olympics; however, it also houses a lot of artisans, and I picked up some hand-dyed sock yarn from one of them. There's also more food in the market.  Real donuts in fact - not just that stuff they pass off at Tim Horton's (apologies to our friend who is a 'baker' at the chain).  Liss wanted to document one of the signs of a real donut, the crust formed by....yes, deep frying!  Yay!

 

Look at that! That's what your donut should look like.

Amazingly we managed to waddle our way to the bus to get us over to the UBC Thunderbird Arena for a playoff game (for 5th & 6th spots) between Switzerland & Russia.  We hadn't really checked our tickets, so we were quite surprised when we made our way to our seats:

 

Yes, we were in the very first row, and there were empty seats next to us (later taken up by a couple of boys, perhaps 10 and 11, one of whom did a hysterical play-by-play that often consisted of "The puck is in the neutral zone.  One Swiss player sent it to another Swiss player" and so forth).

This game was good because the teams were so evenly matched.  In fact, it went to a shoot-out, which the Swiss team won.

 

 

Of course it all had to end, and we boarded our plane the next day.  Just to totally kill the illusion of any more vacation, I graded papers on the flight.  Oh yeah, party time is over.  But we had a great time.  We got to know D. & S. better (it feels weird not to be able to just hang out with them now) and see so many different skilled athletes compete. Liss says next time we'll have tickets to the gold medal games.  It's going to be a few years for that though.