On Tuesday night we headed out to a Victory Ceremony where we saw Mike Robertson get his silver medal from the snowboard cross. That was awesome. The Victory Ceremonies are pretty good because each one is dedicated to a province or territory, so they do a cultural show beforehand, then the medals are presented, then there`s a concert afterwards. And they do medal presentations in Whistler as well, and show them up on the screen in the Vancouver venue, which is also nice. We saw 5 medal presentations, which meant a lot of standing up and down as the anthems were played.

We also happened to catch Maelle Ricker`s gold medal run in the women`s snowboard cross too, as we walked around Gastown taking in the sights. We watched through the window of a pub, gathering quite a crowd with us too. So exciting.

Wednesday night was even more special as we actually saw a Canadian win a medal live, at the short-track speedskating. That was exciting, and we found out that it was Marianne St-Gelais` birthday too, so she got a silver medal on her birthday, which is a great present. There was a group of Brits near us who apparently were relatives of one of the British men relay skaters, and he came up to visit them after his race. That was nice. And THEN, there was a group of Italians who were cheering on Arianna Fontana, the bronze medalist in Marianne`s race. It seemed like they actually knew her, as they were going crazy during the race, and then afterwards they even called Italy to let everyone know (which was crazy because it was about 18:30 here in Vancouver, which means it was well into the middle of the night in Italy, but an Olympic medal is pretty exciting–I know I`d want to be woken up if a friend or relative of mine one, that`s for sure.)