The Pursuit of Happiness ... House

WARNING: This post contains overly-joyous music brought to you by Coca Cola. Listener discretion is advised.


Hey everyone,

It's been a little while since I last posted and that's because I've been working on a really long, extensive post which I will be putting up soon, once the headache it has given me goes away.

Anyway, in the past few days I have visited a number of the pavilions. On Wednesday I went to Yaletown, deciding to try my luck getting in to the walled-in venue where the Coca Cola (real name is the "Happiness House") pavilion, as well as the Samsung and Acer tents are. I experienced a rare phenomena in that the line was quite short (around 15 minutes wait), so in a matter of moments I was inside. On stage, French Canadian folk singers were entertaining the masses and near the entrance was a row of food vendors, each serving different meals from around the world.

I had come to the pavilion with the direct intent of obtaining one of those glowing, limited edition coke bottles that's a part of Coke's "Open Happiness" campaign. To my dismay, I found out that the only way to get one was to wait in the snaking line-up for the Happiness House tent. Well, when my heart is set on a useless, dust-collecting knick-knack, nothing can stop me, so I decided to suck it up and waited around 30 minutes (which is pretty good by pavilion standards). As I waited and got closer to the entrance, I observed Coca Cola staff members and what their jobs were. There were two guys whose sole responsibilities were to unhook the sides of the tent and flap them every time another staff member came out and yelled "We need air!" And they actually have a high-fiver at the entrance! Can you imagine, it's somebody's job to high-five a bunch of freebie-grubbers like myself. They must have hired one too many people to create a useless position like that. Well, good on Coca Cola for being all-inclusive. I wonder what that job would look like on a resumé...

The Coke tent is divided up into rooms, the first one being a walk-in history of the company's history, including displays of all the old bottle designs and the Olympic torches going back to the 1996 Games. It's impossible to read any of the artifact captions because your being scuttled through quite quickly, but at least all the exhibits were at eye level so that everybody could see them. And since everybody would rather watch and not read, maybe I was the only one disappointed by this. Anyway, after the mini-museum, groups of people at time were crammed into a tiny theatre and made to watch a blessedly short Coca Cola PR video that detailed the company's ties with the Olympics. I didn't much care for this part, thinking it a waste of time, being on a one-track mind to get a friggin' glowing bottle as I was. The Coke rep who played the video to us got everyone to count down from three, and as we all shouted in unison: three...two...one! she slid back the wall with the theatre screen on it to reveal the heart of Happiness House.

Music was blasting, people were in line-ups all over the place, a magician was in the center of the room, juggling crystal balls -- exactly like David Bowie did in Labyrinth (and if you weren't distracted by something else Bowie had in that movie, you'll remember exactly what I'm talking about). Reps behind a bar handed out ice-cold Cokes in the 2010 Olympic bottles to everyone coming through, and if you were keen to stand in line, you could play recycling-themed video games on a big screen, or get your picture taken with the Coca Cola polar bear. I wandered around a bit, but my movement was rather restricted by the hoards of people, so I made my way to the exit.

And that's when I saw them: the glowing bottles. Because Coke is repenting its many years of using environmentally-unsound plastic bottles, it's all about going green now. A series of plastic tubes zigzag around the exit, and if you give a Coke rep your bottle, he/she will feed it into one of these tubes, where it will be sucked up into an unseen recycling box, and a glowing bottle will shoot down it its place, a great memento proving you helped Coca Cola save the environment. There were also less exciting recycling boxes next to the exit doors, where a glowing bottle would also appear if you recycled. I went to these ones because the line for the plastic shoots was annoyingly long, and placing my empty bottle into the box, a bottle glowing red, blue, green and yellow came up, I grabbed it, and felt instantly accomplished.

These glowing bottles are going for $100 or more on eBay, so I highly recommend getting down there and grabbing one while you still can.

Until next time!

-Bonnie