Soo, Wednesday before last I headed down to the waterfront downtown to check out what they had planned. Mainly it involved street hockey, people on stilts, music and a huuuuge stage.
Later on when the ceremonies began, there was a First Nations witnessing ceremony, where they basically tell people that they need to remember the event so that they can tell other people about it - oral history and all that jazz (think blogging will as a technology-enabled equivalent...). In the picture above you can see the procession (on the big screen) coming up towards the stage where they all did some funky dancing and drumming and stuff.
The ceremonies culminated in the lighting of the Olympic cauldron, which was the main reason I had gone down there. After a slight hitch, where it didn't actually light after the countdown had got to 'one', all was well and it all looked very pretty.
Next there was to be some more exciting things going on on stage, but I think most people have no idea what it was that happened next because one of the MCs uttered the words 'enough cake for everyone', which of course can have no other effect than to cause a stampede towards the cake! So while a very excellent Bach choir was being ignored on stage, I meanwhile was being gradually compressed by the crowd towards the cake. (I so happened to have unwittingly stood next to one of the cake tents...).They were right though, there was more than enough cake for every one - they were huge!
Only the forefront of the baying crowd (i'd have been slightly terrified if I was a chef with cake at my fingertips...):
The cake was quite nice, in case you were wondering.
Meanwhile, I feel duty bound to give a mention to the people who were intent upon going around chucking small flyers around like confetti, upon which they called people not to celebrate 125 years of colonialism and oppression, and various other slightly random causes they had picked.
They definitely have a point. And as an anthropologist, I was going to write a longer and more involved post on the matter, but right now it's sunny outside, so that might have to wait for later. Indeed there were people here for hundreds of years before anything resembling Vancouver, and perhaps all that has transpired over the last 125 years has not been perfect. Equally, Vancouver is an amazing city - pretty impressive for only 125 years anyway. And more importantly, why would you skip an excuse for cake? If only more neocolonialism and oppression could take the form of cake and music. In the same way that I'm not exactly a royalist, but it is completely beyond me why anyone is complaining at getting an extra bank holiday for it...
Anywayz... Pretty lights...
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