La Place de la Francophonie est la place to be.

I’m not planning to see any athletic events at these Vancouver Olympics—there’s no way I’ll spend that kind of money on sport when I could be spending it on arts and culture, not to mention food and rent. Besides, you don’t need to spend a cent to have a good time in the city right now, as there are many free national pavilions and entertainment zones dotted around the city.

However, most of these places have at least two major drawbacks: the lineups, and the lineups.

I wandered past LiveCity Yaletown on Friday evening before the opening ceremony, only to find a lineup outside that stretched for about eight blocks. And even though the place was full and the line wasn’t moving, people were still joining the line. Wow. We really ARE sheep.

Due to these offensively long lineups I haven’t even tried to get into a LiveCity site. But word comes back from those who have. First you must line up for waaaay too long. Then you must go through airport-level security screening, and when you finally get inside, you are obliged to line up all over again, multiple times in fact, for the privilege of being viciously advertised to in the brainwashing tents of several major Olympic sponsors.

In sum, the LiveCity sites are a corporate clusterfuck in a cultural abattoir and I’ll have nothing to do with them.

Meanwhile, on nearby Granville Island, the Place de la Francophonie features big stages, big crowds and big entertainment with no lineup, no security, and no merde. (Well, aside from the $7 bieres. C’est la lie, eh?) Who cares if you can’t understand French. Je ne comprends pas 90 per cent of it and je still has a great time.

The three stages feature top French talent, most of whom have never played Vancouver before and will never play Vancouver again. Yesterday I enjoyed the prime electro-funk of Misteur Valaire, plus the florid stylings of esoteric popster Pierre Lapointe—who I am listening to as I type this post—and what’s more, I was there when Quebecois downhiller Alexandre Bilodeau won the much-hyped first Canadian gold medal on Canadian soil. You couldn’t have found a more joyeuse crowd anywhere in this town when les français learned that one of their own had broken The Curse—talk about the gravy on my Olympic poutine!

So screw you, English devils. You can have your LiveCity lineups and LiveCity security. You can eat your McDonald’s and drink your Cokes on the flatbed of a Chevrolet while using an Acer computer hooked up to a Panasonic screen to surf the CTV web site via a Bell Internet connection. I’m sticking with mes homies français at La Place de la Francophonie.