Ottawa

Well - I am making up for the lack of posts by posting twice today - although I guess this one will also be sans pictures unless the line suddenly starts to cooperate...

I thought it was my duty as a tourist to do some more serious sightseeing - so I hopped on the train to Ottawa today. Ottawa is only 2 hours from Kingston by rail. I found out that you can also go by boat - but that takes 3 days because of the speed limits on the Rideau canal and the number of locks you have to negotiate. So train was definitely a better option.

In Ottawa, I hopped onto the local Greyline bus tour to find out what I should see.

They have two flavours of bus - an authentic old double decker bus and a trolley bus with hard wooden seats and no windows... The no windows is lovely for taking pictures, but when the bus gets a bit of speed up it is really windy and impossible (for me at least) to hear the commentary. So I hopped off at the aviation museum and spent 45 minutes visting the Lancaster and then hopped onto the next bus - the double decker.

Ottawa is a really pretty, open city. Lots of sculpture and majestic buildings and canals and rivers running through it. The Quebec border runs right through it - so, like Canberra, there is another city practically joined on but in another state (well, province to be technically correct). Gatineau (the other city) has the casino, but other than that, does look like a poor cousin. And because it is in Quebec, the signs are in French (with a little English translation) rather than in English then French. It also has horizontal traffic lights that it introduced as an aide to colourblind people - the red is a square and the amber is a triangle as well.

After circling the attractions on the bus tour, I decided, as a capital city resident, to tour the State Parliament buildings. These were built not all that long before our own Old Parliament house (the original buildings from the mid to late 1800s, other than the Library, burned down in 1917. The library was saved because it had iron doors which a quick thinking librarian closed against the fire) but are on a much grander scale.

(This is one of those places where the pictures would come in if I could upload them).

I also found out that the Canadian Senate is not elected - but appointed. It is not there to represent the provinces in the same way that the Australian Senate represents the States, rather the idea is that, because it is appointed, it is supposed to have representation for all of the different ethnic interests. Incidentally - another fact I learned is that caucus is a word from the Algonquin people.

I saw the house of commons (their words), senate, and went up the big clock tower at the front of the building (the peace tower built after the first world war) from which there are excellent views of the city (fortunately there is an elevator).

One more piece of trivia (boring? No - never) is that there is a cat refuge in the grounds of parliament house.

After the parliament house tour (which incidentally is EXCELLENT value - it's free), I was lucky enought to be passing as some boats were going through the 7 or 8 locks on the Rideau canal. Which was really interesting to watch.

So much for the wildlife tour - a beaver (the small furry mammal that inhabits Canada) was frolicking around on the side of the lock while the boats were going through. I have had a big day for wildlife I also saw a mother deer and two fauns on the drive to the station this morning in Kingston -lucky I paid for that wildlife tour in Banff.

Then I went to the Bytown museum - that was also free after 5. Not that it was worth a lot more - but there was also a free audio tour that took 45 minutes - so I have done 2 45 minute museums today! And just be grateful that I am not providing you with more history of Ottawa and the Rideau canal!

After that, a bit of a wander through the Bytown markets and dinner at the Canadian version of an Irish pub. There is a lovely lot of outdoor dining here - and the streets were full of people enjoying the dusk at 7pm.

Enough blogging for today!