My first stop was Ontario pavilion with their 4D theater. Even though I got there just 20 minutes after it opened the wait was still about 40 minutes and the movie is only about 7 minutes long. It was a pretty cool video though. I would say the 4D effects are better than those of the 4D theater at the aquarium. They timed and directed the water hitting you so that it's like it came right out of the splash on the screen. You also go on a roller coaster briefly and the vibration of the chair feels like you're on it.
Inside the pavilion after the movie I got a sample of some sort of apple dessert with caramel. I then got in line for the booth for using your brain waves to control the lights on the CN tower, the parliament buildings or Niagara falls, but then I thought it'd be better to do that one at night when you could better see the light. I came back later.
Next I visited the Saskatchewan pavilion which included this dome which lights up when it's dark with images of the province.
Inside the dome there were some booths about the province. One booth let you get a photo of yourself in the province using a green screen. There was actually a line-up! I suppose it's much faster than actually going to Saskatchewan. I was given a pin and a little packet of yogurt lentil clusters, which just tasted like yogurt.
In the other tent where they have a stage and food for sale there were samples of lentils salad. It just tasted like bean salad. Apparently it's power food.
Next I walked over to the BC Powersmart village over on the other side of BC place. There was a tent with comfortable wooden seats where you could watch the Olympics.
Then in another tent they had the sustainable dance floor.
As you dance on it you generate energy that is saved.
Inside the building they had a timeline of BC hydro's history including these quotes, one of which mentions Dawson Creek, where I grew up. It was interesting to see how Vancouver used street cars on rails before buses took over everywhere. BC hydro's predecessor used to handle the transit too.
Next I popped over to the Bell Ice Cube where they give you a pair of earbud headphones you can keep. Inside there were screens all around showing different live Olympics coverage. There were also some videos you could watch about the history of the Olympics. In either case you just plugged your headphones into the display or the dangling connections to hear the audio. The history video pedestal things were not very well designed though with a sensor that would only keep the video going if you were standing on one side of it. Plus you had to look down at the video which isn't great on the neck.
At the Bell Ice Cube there were some past Olympics medal winners being interview by other past Olympics winners. Charmaine Crooks (a past Canadian track and field Olympian) was one of the interviewers. She first interviewed Johann Koss (a past Norwegian speed skater and current coach of the Norway team) about the Right To Play organization. Then they had Clara Hughes there for a bit, who is the only winner of multiple medals in both the summer and winter Olympics, and she's Canadian.
They also brought out Catriona Le May Doan, another Canadian multiple medal winner in speed skating, and a torch bearer at the opening ceremonies. They asked her how it felt to be the torch bearer and she said "Which part? The part where it didn't come up?". She was the one who's "ice spier" did not come up so she didn't have anything to light with her torch because of the malfunction. So together the people on the Bell Ice Cube stage at this point had won 15 Olympic medals. Clara had to leave shortly after to get to some other event.
I left the Bell Ice cube before the end of the interview so I could find a place to watch the women's hockey gold medal game. Along the way I saw Batman!
I went to Robson square to watch the game hoping that perhaps someone I knew would be there but I couldn't find anyone so I found a seat near the front of the lower area. I watched the first period in which Canada scored the only two goals of the game. Around the time that they scored the second goal Gordon entered Robson square and walked up the back of the lower area to get a seat in the upper area. I didn't know he was there and I left after the first period.
I went back to the Powersmart tent where I got a comfy seat 5 minutes later to watch the rest of the game from. The second period had just as many penalties but no goals. The Canadian goalie played amazingly, surviving 5 on 3s twice. In the third period there were no goals and no penalties and so Canada took the gold for the 3rd Olympics in a row. I just hope they keep this event in the Olympics despite Canada and the US destroying everyone.
After the game I went over to the library to see CODE live 3, a digital art exhibit. Here they had a net with hundreds of paper airplanes. Except they weren't airplanes. Instead the paper was folded into the shape of maple seeds. Even when I went down and made one myself it still seemed to look a lot like a paper airplane.
What they have is a pneumatic tube that shoots the paper a few stories above the net and then it falls down down down onto the net to join everyone else's papers. Each piece of paper has a blinking LED light attached to it.
Here's my piece of paper with the battery and light. First you write a message of how you bring peace to the world on the paper. For the Olympics countries agree to be peaceful, so this was ideas to make the whole world peaceful all the time.
Here is the tube attempting to shoot a paper up it. This paper and mine which went before it both needed a couple of attempts to work. My paper got stuck partway up because the air didn't catch the pocket well. Then we had to let it fall and then try again. I guess my message for peace was not strong enough.
So, the last thing I did in Vancouver was revisit the Ontario pavilion and control the lights of Niagara falls with my brain waves. It sounds cool but it wasn't. The lineup was about an hour but went by quickly because they were playing the ski aerials on the big screens there. I watched as the Canadian who had the best score going into the last jump ended up getting 5th.Anyways so when I got to the front of the line a guy had me sit in a chair and put on a head set that touched my forehead. On the screen there was a meter that had a baseline and went from smilie face to concentrating face. He told me that the meter would go up and down depending on how relaxed I was and then told me to focus really hard on something. The meter moved a bit but he declared that the machine was still broken and I'd need to wait for another one.
So a few minutes later I sat down in a different chair and a girl started instructing me, except that the instructions were very minimal and the girl looked to be about 13 years old. Sometimes the meter seemed to move according to my relaxation but sometimes it didn't. Perhaps it was because I was concentrating too hard on relaxing. So then the training period was over and all of the sudden I was controlling the lighting of Niagara falls. It was done by using a simple colour scale where you used a different colour depending on how relaxed you were. I could only get it to move to two different colours near the baseline and it didn't really go where I wanted it to. It was kind of lame. I had expected more instruction on how exactly to think to get your brainwaves to change.
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