What to do when the Games prorogue your semester

The Winter Olympics have begun in Vancouver and Maclean’s OnCampus has, at great expense and undergoing no small amount of bureaucratic hassle, parachuted your favourite advice columnists (us) to the west coast and installed us at a luxuriously appointed Olympic headquarters in beautiful East Vancouver.

But why would they send education advice columnists to the Olympics?

Good question. For days now, we’ve been wondering why we’re here — not in the existential sense, (we’re much too shallow for that) but in the very real, practical, work-related sense.

Upon visiting all of our favourite Vancouver haunts, like the University of British Columbia, Simon Fraser University, The Cambie Pub and even Capilano College University (we were getting desperate), we discovered that all of Vancouver’s post-secondary institutions have closed their doors for the duration of the Games. Under the flimsy pretext of not wanting to add to the Games’ traffic problems, (we suspect it’s actually because they wanted time off to go to beer gardens) university administrators have shut tens of thousands of students out of their laboratories and lecture theaters, leaving them with nothing to learn for two whole weeks!

Clearly, we’ve been sent on a mission of mercy, to find educational opportunities for these poor students. For four days now, we have visited every bar, beer garden and free concert we had the patience to get through the lineup of, in search of learning experiences we could pass on to you, our readers. We came away with little more than a headache and a nagging suspicion that we had been robbed. For what it’s worth, here’s what we discovered:

Downtown (Sociology, Anthropology)

You don’t have to go to any organized events to learn something about human behaviour here in Vancouver. The streets downtown are packed with visitors and there are endless opportunities for making ethno-anthropological observations. People from all over the world can be observed in their native dress, enacting their cultures’ own peculiar rituals.

For example, we learned that Norwegians traditionally paint Norwegian flags on their faces and sing to each other from across the street. Dutch people wear orange hats shaped like chicken carcasses and they don’t dismount their bicycles when riding through places crowded with pedestrians. Americans paint the letters “S”, “A” and “U” on their naked chests in white, blue or red paint, and then sometimes stand in the wrong order.

Getting downtown might be a daunting prospect with all of the road closures and the pressures placed on parking by all of the beer gardens foreigners have built in parking lots, but we’ll let you in on a secret: take your bike. If you don’t have a bike, buy one; if you can’t afford a bike, steal one. (Editor’s note: Maclean’s OnCampus does not endorse bicycle theft.)

Cycling is the fastest and most convenient way to get around downtown. Cars are no longer permitted on half of the roads, but to our amazement, we found that bicycles are allowed everywhere. While crowds of pedestrians are shuffling down the sidewalk to get a glimpse of the Olympic flame, you can ride your bike down the closed and totally empty street and take a good long look, until a very nice security person comes to tell you you’re not allowed to stop on the street.

Deutsches Haus (Foreign Relations, German)

That Deutsches Haus means “German House” in German is just one of the lessons you’ll learn in this parking lot that the Germans have turned into an oasis of beer and sausage. The lineup may look forbiddingly long, but it moves relatively quickly. This is largely because they charge $8.25 for a beer and $7.00 for a sausage, so most people can’t afford to stay very long.

Inside, you’ll find a very large TV and long tables lined with people drinking beer and watching the Olympics. If you look carefully, you may even find a German in the crowd who you can practice your pluperfect indicative conjugation on (ich hatte ein bier getrunken; du hattest ein bier getrunken).

In our experience, Deutsche Haus is an excellent place to watch Alexandre Bilodeau win Canada’s first gold medal last Sunday. If you can make it there in time, we highly recommend it.

Holland House (Political Science)

The first lesson at Holland House in Richmond is that there are two separate entrances, one for Dutch citizens and one for everyone else. The second lesson is that the Dutch people who go to the Dutch entrance can walk right into Holland House, and that the lineup for everyone else takes about two and a half hours to get through.

The third thing we learned was how to get back to Vancouver, because we weren’t willing to wait that long for overpriced Heineken.