So much for the daily updates. I have been taking an awful lot of pictures and video (with my Flip mini) but various events have conspired to either prevent or discourage me from actually posting.

Fireworks followed lighting of the Olympic cauldron at Canada Place.

We attended Ladies Moguls on Saturday and Mens Moguls on Sunday at Cypress Mountain. There’s more to say about Cypress Mountain but I’m not going to go into it here because it’ll only raise my blood pressure. Do a Google News search for “Cypress Mountain” and you’ll get the gist.

Canadian Moguls star Jennifer Heil prepares for her silver-medal winning run.

We’re persevering, though, and have replaced most of the canceled tickets with other events in town. Mostly hockey. We’ll be seeing a lot of hockey, both Womens and Mens. Speaking of which, why are the skiing events for women called “Ladies” but the hockey events are called “Womens”?

Face-off near the end of Womens USA vs. Russia hockey at UBC Thunderbird Arena.

The aspect of this trip that’s making all the ticketing troubles fade away is the restaurant and bar scene here in Vancouver. The Gastown area, where we’re staying, is almost nothing but pubs, restaurants, bars, etc for several blocks in every direction.

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Not to mention many, many more places in the downtown area and other neighborhoods. We’ve been here six days, have been to a minimum of two different places per day (no repeats) and there’s no end in sight. At some point I’ll list them all here; I have saved all the receipts both for reference and to apply for GST refund when we get home.

The lights of Gastown as viewed from near the Gassy Jack statue.

There’s plenty to do outside of eating, drinking and the occasional Olympic event, of course. VANOC has set up two “LiveCity” locations, one very close to us in the downtown area and one a bit further away in Yaletown. We found ourselves near the Yaletown location on Tuesday night and stuck around for a while to watch some event coverage, medal ceremonies and a musical act. One of the songs they played might be familiar to longtime Disneyland fans…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3txwe0oH_54]

Today is an off day, with no events scheduled (or canceled…) so we’re doing some more exploring. Vancouver is much like San Francisco in that it’s very walkable, but unlike San Francisco the hills are merely “hills” and not “nearly vertical summits”. Public transit is free to visitors during the Games and we’ve used that a few times, but are mostly walking from place to place.

I’ll continue adding pictures to this photo album every couple of days, and do blog updates when I can. You might be interested in following my Twitter feed at least for the duration; most of what ends up in blog posts is Tweeted live as it happens.