Chapter 45 “Whisterling Dixie”: the 2010 Olympics, Taiwan Fest

Conventional wisdom has it that there’s nothing like out-of-town company to give you a new attitude to your home. We all get stuck in the tedium of our daily lives, and there is nothing like the enthusiasm of a visitor to shake us out of it. As comfortable and as routine as my own turf might be to me (and despite my yearning to be elsewhere), it is a wonderful and exciting place for people from other places. For this reason, and also because many of my readers are overseas, there should be nothing wrong with my writing a travel blog about home. Nobody will sue me for doing so—although, in these days of $2 million lawsuits for spilled coffee and $43 million for trousers lost at the cleaners, you never know.

Here it is—a “staycation” blog entry.

I wanted to check the exact meaning of the idiom “whistling Dixie”. The expression means “to describe a thing in a more positive manner than reality merits”. I think that’s what many people have been doing around here, with reference to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Whistler BC.

As I understand it, Whistler was named after a kind of local ground hog that whistles when popping out of its den—presumably in an effort to see what all the fuss is about.

In any event, “we” (whoever that is) “won” the bid for the 2010 Winter Games. Many people consider this to an example of the old caution “be careful what you wish for”. Whistler is a world-class (read too expensive for most people) ski resort an hour (the way some people drive and double that if I do) north of Vancouver, and everyone seems to have an opinion for or against hosting the games. At my age, I get grumpy about waste of money and hype.

Lao-puo Suzanne and I hadn’t been up to Whistler for years, so we made a day trip of it a few weeks back. The highway to Whistler is called the Sea-to-Sky, because it follows along the coast before climbing into the mountains. As we drove south, on the way home, we were both reminded of the east coast of Taiwan between Taroko and Yilan—except that the road is wider and there are no daredevil gravel truck drivers bent on vehicular homicide as there are in Taiwan.

The first leg ends at the end of Howe Sound, at a beautiful little town called Squamish. We then started climbing through the mountains. The scenery is quite spectacular and the road has recently been improved considerably.

When we got to the town, it was very difficult to find parking. I can just imagine the people-mountain-people-sea during the Olympic Games, with the prices for everything through the roof. For the moment, the prices were reasonable for lunch and in the shops. You can bet that will change as well. I remember a reporter, during the Winter Olympics in Norway (and that was quite a few years ago) aghast because his pizza was $80 US!

How Suzanne enjoys a few days in Vancouver! She came over for Taiwan Fest and we enjoyed all our usual favourites—ham sausage, barbecued squid, dumplings, and the like. I ditched my car at the office and we took the new Canada Line Subway to get to it. It’s a funny thing—Chinese people in Taiwan dress differently and act differently from Chinese people who have been here for many years. There is something about intangible mannerisms, the hanging out in large family groups, the way the young women are casually overdressed—even people’s glasses are a different style. We could have sworn we were in Taipei. In fact I did swear, the day before during our reconnaissance, when I saw that parking would have been $40—and I don’t mean NT dollars either. The entertainment was lame—a rock band with a western lead singer who could have done with grammar (and singing) lessons.

Lao-puo had already discovered the Chinese supermarket in the basement of Metrotown Mall in Burnaby, and another at 1st and Renfrew. They dish up free samples at both locations, and if you time it right you can make a lunch out of it. Vancouver is so cosmopolitan these days that nobody bats an eye when a western person speaks Chinese.

I’ll be writing in a few weeks about Ontario, because we are going east to visit Renée at the end of September. Cuba in January. Back to Asia in 2010 for a few weeks.

Life is good.

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