MINI Adventures - Figure skating with perverts
Over the next couple of days (I can't remember exactly, I probably shouldn't have waited three months before updating this!) I went on a tour of the city with Karla, Chrystal and Sarah (at various times!)
This is Granville island, its an arty area built on one side of false creek under one of the main bridges, and looks out onto downtown Vancouver.
We ate in the market and checked out a couple of the art galleries at the University there, before crossing the (false) creek via a humourous little CBBC cartoon-like miniature ferry.
We walked along the coastal walk towards Stanley Park which was a bit chilly, but still buzzing with people. This part must be fantastic in the summer. (fair enough it doesn't look like its buzzing but it was!)
It was getting late as we wandered through Stanley park.(which is actually bigger than Central Park in New York - I think I remember reading that its so big it has its own micro-climate!) The sun was going down and just catching the mist in the air and it looked really magical.
Again I wished I wasn't going back to Romford.
(Btw - If you thought that looked a bit like a shot from the X-files, thats because it was made in Vancouver before the cast decided the production should be switched to LA where it rained less!)
Later, or possibly on another day (?!?) Sarah managed to get us tickets for a big figure skating tournament. She'd tried to get tickets to a hockey match but couldn't get any, which was a shame as I would've liked to have seen that. I don't say that often with sports... must be something to do with the whole legality of unchecked full contact aggresion!
It should still be fun though I thought, secretly knowing that the fun would come from watching all the fit skater birds in mini-skirts. And I wasn't let down, I looked around the stadium and it was clear that of the other few blokes in the stadium, thay also had the same idea.
"Yes dear. Nice, um, Tactics..."
It was probably 98% women in the stadium and everyone had clapped politely as the female Canadian, American, Russian and European skaters jumped and flipped and pirouetted across the ice.
There was a break, and then it was the turn of the men. The stadium erupted. It was like all around me the quietly clapping, smartly dressed middle aged women of Vancouver had all popped a lady-viagra into their half-time hot dogs. I realised I was surrounded by the Canadian equivalent of the Fat Slags from Viz!
Coo-oer! Look the legs on 'im Linda! OOOOOHH! Look at him FLY! The skater blokes played up to them and wiggled their arses and winked at every opportunity, sending a Mexican Quiver (the middle-aged lady giggle gossip version of the 'Wave') throughout the arena.
Now this may go on all the time in figure skating, but it was a suprise to me! I felt utterly justified perving at the girls again when the mixed competiton started!
At the end of the night, the Canadians rightly won (they were clearly the best - and played expertly to their home audience) but that wasn't the main thing. The most important part of the night, is that they beat the Americans! It was nothing personal, just like us beating the French at something.
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The Next day (probably) Sarah, Darren and I were driving up to Whistler for a day on the slopes. We weren't leaving until the evening so we dropped in at the local anthropology museum and then went for lunch.
Here's a little fact for you. Did you know Indians (the Indians the Cowboys fought) didn't have totem poles. Only the Indian's more closely related to Eskimo's did, much further to the North. I took this picture for my sister as Dad told her there'd be totem poles in Monument valley and the around the Grand Canyon and stuff.
Nope, they're all up here!
They had an exhibition on the early exploration of the Pacific Islands and the artefacts gathered from each island by the early explorers. Its was weird reading about explorers 200 years ago who'd done the same route as I had... Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, the Cook Islands, refuel in Tahiti... I wondered if people would do an exhibition on me in 200 years if they found my website backed up in an archaic PC somewhere...
What would they think of my frank and intellectual perspective on the philosophical qualities and harsh realites of life in the 21st Century?
And then I saw a sculpture of a giant hawk humping a turtle. And look! The turtle has a man head poking out! Usually its the man with a turtle head poking out! Oh, I love poo jokes.
I heard a great new phrase for doing a huge poo the other day... The 'Winston Churchill'