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It is a bit strange to come for the Winter Olympics and realize it’s possible you’ll never actually see a flake of snow. There are cherry blossoms outside city hall already, and the crocuses are blooming in my old neighborhood. People are cleaning up their gardens and trimming their hedges.
As Mayor Gregor Robertson told me, “There’s a little bit of spring in the air.”
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| Larry W. Smith / EPA |
| A general view of the city of Vancouver from the top of one of the living quarters at the Vancouver Olympic Village on Feb. 9. |
Granted the warmth did strike a bit early this year, but Vancouverites are not the least bit surprised. I used to live in Vancouver and remember the handful of times it snowed because it came as a shock – and because I had neither a snow shovel nor an ice scraper for the car.
The fact is this is the warmest and wettest city ever to host the Winter Olympics.
It’s also the largest, most metropolitan and most diverse. Most people already know about its stunning geography – nestled between the snow-capped peaks of the Coast Mountain and the Pacific Ocean.
But as John Furlong, head of the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee told me, when they were bidding for the game they discovered lots of people have a superficial knowledge of Vancouver.
“We all feel here that we live in the best place on earth,” Furlong said. “That this is a bit of a jewel that people have really never discovered.”
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