I had a couple lazy days in Ottawa.
Well, if you define lazy as walking a couple dozen kilometres. My feet will be delighted to reach the end of this trip, which is in exactly one week.
But I certainly didn’t push myself. I spent a good amount of time getting lost driving between my friend’s condo in a suburb and the downtown Ottawa area. And some of my time was just spent drifting around the streets near the parliament grounds, soaking in the centre-of-government ambiance.
On Wednesday, I headed downtown with the ambition of getting an inside tour of the centre block of Parliament. The tickets are free, but it turns out they’re hot tickets and getting there after noon was too late to snag one for the day.
So I went to my favourite Canadian museum, the museum formerly known as the Canadian Museum of Civilization (I’m having trouble swallowing the name change to the Canadian Museum of History). It’s a beautiful building, designed by Douglas Cardinal. The permanent exhibits I visited are the First Nations one, and they are pretty good and it’s been years since I visited theme. The museum also had an outstanding travelling exhibit of Greek artifacts. It’s been a real kind of Greco-Roman summer across Canada for me, with the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the Royal Ontario Museum both on board, but this one was also excellent and well designed.
O and I watched boats going through the lock system along the Rideau Canal, which takes a long time but was pretty interesting since I’d never seen a lock system at work before.
Thursday I managed to get to downtown before noon (despite my best efforts at getting lost again). I even managed to get my hands on a Parliament tour ticket for later that afternoon after standing in a Disneyland-worthy line to request a ticket. While waiting I wandered the Bytown Market. Then I went for my tour, which includes about 20 minutes of waiting for the whole group to clear security.
The building is of course lovely, especially the library (the one bit of the centre block that was saved from that fire). But sadly our tour guide was floored when people actually knew the name of the current governor general. As someone who is way beyond the Canadian government 101 that comes with such tours I think that perhaps they should be divided into two categories. One for those who need the intro – after all, international visitors come to the site, as do those who perhaps don’t love politics as much as I do – and another for those of us who just want the details on the building’s construction, symbolism and so on and don’t need the primer on how senators are selected.
For example, I want more information like how owls are all over the Parliament because the group noun for owls is parliament and apparently at least one of the stonemasons had a good sense of humour. That tidbit was actually shared with me by one of roaming Ottawa tourist information people while I was hanging out in that long line.
Because if I have one more tour guide explain to me how the House of Commons and or a legislature carpet is usually green and why, or the role of a governor general or lieutenant governor, I might just lose it. Which is why I stopped doing inside tours of all the different provincial legislatures.
I also got to wander the National Gallery for awhile, though since it was the free evening, I didn’t have a whole day to give to all the galleries. I stuck to the Canadian gallery and the European/American gallery.
One of the coolest moments was hitting an alcove dedicated to early Canadian travel photography and realizing I’d been to every site pictured.
Today was mostly a long driving day, but I did take time to stop in Kingston (the first capital of Canada) and check out Bellevue House, which is a national historic site that can boast that for a time Sir John A. MacDonald lived there. I got the guided tour, during which I learned a lot about the operations of the hous, like the creative ways they hid chamber pots, and the MacDonalds. It was worth the stop and the extra few bucks to get the guided tour for sure.
Tomorrow I will cross the border and hit the windy city for a few days! I’ve heard nothing but amazing things about Chicago, so I’m excited to check it out. In the meantime, terrible hotel wireless Internet means not as many photos today, because I wanted to sleep rather than spend all night loading them.
Victoria Paterson 