Well, the sleep was deep and it was a bit of an effort to get up. But get up we did. Due to having started my Masters I unfortunately have to dedicate some of this holiday to studying. Hence the first two hours of our day I spent busily studying away whilst Claire indulged in a bit of reading. The view out of the window of a couple of office blocks, whilst not the most attractive did distract me momentarily whilst I got lost in my thoughts around theories to understand child’s behaviour.
Midday hit and we headed out to explore. Unlike us we didn’t have too many plans and decided to wander up into the Parliament district of the city, just 10 minutes up the street from where we are staying. The parliament building was nothing like I expected, having seen the redesigned Reichstag last year in Berlin, I expected something new and modern, when in fact it was an old gothic looking building so on top of a hill with beautiful views down towards the river. Originally developed in 1859 he has gone through a bit of rebuilding and adding of sections but it generally keeps with the style.
We were both in need of a café and we’ve found that art gallery or museum cafes tend to be relatively empty, serve good coffee and of a pretty high standard so off we set for what we thought was such a café across the water from the parliament. On the way we saw the impressive lock system of 40 or so locks taking boats through the middle of Ottawa. Its quite a tourist attraction. Not so much for me, having come from the canal boating capital of the UK and having grown up with locks from a child, whilst beautiful to watch the boats come up through them, I wasn’t exactly going to buy an ‘I love Ottawa’s locks’ t-shirt.
We wandered up to what we thought was the café only to find out it was a fair size wooden shack selling hot dogs. On the plus side, it did have nice views down the river. However, it wasn’t really what we were looking for so we moved on. The National Gallery of Canada kind of fulfilled our lunchtime need, if only they had coffee though. That had some sort of jug coffee which you then added water, all I could think of was mugs of Nescafe, so instead I helped myself to one of two craft beers in their fridges. That and a yoghurt and fruit went down nicely and seemed to balance out my calorific intake from last night.
We continued to explore this district and crossed the Alexandra bridge, with amazing views down the wide expanse of the Ottawa river and over to the Museum of Canadian history. Our plan today wasn’t really to go into any of these, rather just to check them out and decide what we wanted to come back to in the next few days. We noticed though as we walked down giant plant like sculptures just the other side of the museum and wander across there to check it out. This year being the 150th year of confederation of Canada there is a lot going on and what we stumbled across was Mosaicanada, which was in fact giant plant sculptures. However the queue was so long that we decided to go back on a week day in the hope there would be less people about.
Our last trip of the afternoon was to ByWard Market, in fact it was a bit like the Queen Vic markets in Melbourne but probably not as big really. Lots of shops surrounded the market and we managed to hone in on the Rocky Mountain Chocolate shop to finally get that ice cream that we hadn’t been able to manage the night before. A stroll back to the hotel and a couple more hours of study before the start of the evenings festivities with tonight being Claire’s choice of restaurant.
Fauna, if I’m honest, wasn’t that bad. Its one of those restaurants that has just five items on each section of the menu and if you don’t like any, that’s your problem. Luckily enough I liked one of them. I mean, I’ve never tried Bison and I don’t know what a bavette is (its ribbon pasta and I got three whole bits). So me being the adventurous type (I’d try most types of burger apart from chicken), I decided to give it a go. The meat was delicious, it was served with parsnips and they had this herb stuffing coating in breadcrumbs. I mean, what is not to like. I fail to mention of course they served me two beers I’d never tried as well. But then again, if they served me Canada’s third most popular beer, I’ve probably never tried it.
Our plan was to wander up to the Parliament precinct after dinner to watch the light display, which is superimposed onto the parliament. However a little sprinkling of rain and we are easily put off. So back to our hotel room and planning our day tomorrow. I’ve decided we need to try some uniquely Canadian foods, such as Poutine or Beaver Tails. Poutine just sounds delicious to my English background, it involves chips, cheese curd and gravy. Sounds like my Uni years all over again (just wish they had that deep fried battered hamburger over here). Beavertails are a completely other beast, they are a pastry, rolled out like an oval shaped pizza and then covered in a sweet topping like chocolate hazelnut and peanut butter pieces.
I go to bed dreaming of that deliciousness!
IJS 16/07/2017