Postcards from Ottawa

Back for some more photos from our recent trip! As well as going to Montreal for 3 nights, we came home via Ottawa, staying with Josh and Elli who have been there about as long as we've been in Hamilton. They kindly put us up in their basement apartment. I was extremely jealous of their new kitchen and bathroom fittings - but less jealous of the bathroom rail that came so easily out of the wall when Josh reached up to close the window...

Here is a picture of Josh making flash-steps in his kitchen. Elli looks on, impressed.


We arrived mid-Saturday, and J+E packed us a picnic lunch which we took to the big park area in town. Picnic blanket shenanigans ensued, with a hapless Josh finding himself tied up by a one-handed Forgi (the other hand occupied with a nectarine).

The main area of Ottawa is set around a lake, a little like Canberra. Unlike Canberra, many of the buildings are much older. The main parliament building is set right on the edge. This is, in fact, the building where Stephen Harper recently pulled Canada out of the Kyoto agreement. Go Steve! :-P

Just beside are this interesting series of locks leading to the lake.

Here's an amphibious tour bus. Apparently one of these sank a few years ago and a few grannies got killed. The bus was a bit too airtight - to the point where nobody could actually get out. I guess they must have dredged the bus as soon as the emergency services could get organised, by which time a few of the more fragile passengers had died from the various stresses involved. Oops!

Another statue of some musketeer guy who founded the city or something...

Here is a statue that's clearly of far greater historical significance. Err, actually it seems to exist only for taking silly photos...

Later that evening, we caught a taxi to go see a fireworks competition. That was pretty cool - some of the best fireworks I've seen. The taxi only had room for 3 in the back, and we had to make sure none of the police cars (there were heaps directing traffic because of the fireworks display) saw us. Forgi got the short straw...

The fireworks were cool!

Also, B(if)tek, one of my favourite Australian electronica acts are apparently really popular here!

No wait, this is just a beefsteak restaurant. Oh well. Anyway, a good time was had by all!

(Well can _you_ take a photo of the back of your own head? It takes skill!)

Goo

I have to tell you about my goo collection. It is very good. I now have:

• hair goo (Forgi made it for me to help me not go bald any more ;-);
• hand sanitising goo (Forgi got some from work, they use it for experiments);
• goo (plain);
• 2 kinds of Maple Syrup, one of which is special stuff from Montreal our neighbour gave us;
• mission goo.

I want to collect more kinds of goo. Please give me suggestions!

I am not at all stressed about work deadlines!

Bye!

The Royal Mountain of Quebec

Hi!

Forgi and I went with her folks to Montreal and Ottawa last week! It was fun!

In Montreal, we stayed 3 nights and had two days sightseeing in the Old Port area where there are lots of historic buildings and pleasant water views. We could have easily occupied oourselves for a week or more with what there was to do and see in Montreal, but that will have to wait for another time. We were staying on the French-speaking side of the main river-bound island (okay both sides are bilingual, but the side we were on leaned toward French), so we confused a few waitresses by saying "Bonjour!" and then staring blankly at them when they continued in fluent French. We were staying in the Latin quarter, on Rue St Christophe (Avenue), which was near a whole bunch of restaurants.

Here are some photos of Montreal:

The Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours. Originally a relatively humble chapel built by the early settlers, including a rather determined "uncloistered nun" by the name of Marguerite Bourgeoys. The rear section (originally built as a school house) had been converted into a history museum which was very informative. It seems Ms Bourgeoys travelled the Atlantic 7 times during her 80 years. There is an interesting portrait painting of her that had been painted over several times over the centuries. In the 20th century, they discovered this using x-rays and decided to see what the original looked like - quite different! The original painting was of an old, very lived-in face of a woman who obviously had a lot going on, whereas the idealised version that had ended up on top after multiple re-paintings looked much more like the old woman who'll sit you down with a cup of hot chocolate and ry your clothes.


Lots of big churches in the area of various denominations. Here is the church of the ABC (see the ABC logo in the centre of the picture). Actually, the logo is an M and an A superimposed, and was seen in several places, including on a seminary building which was the oldest building on the island.

Another old-manor-turn-museum in the middle of town had a large vegetable garden. I think these cabbages seemed much more impressive still in the ground than when they finally end up chopped up and steamed on your dinner plate.

The City Hall. There were several buildings around with the green roofs such as this. There were tours going on in the interior, which was very dark due to very little natural light being let in. There was a large display panel inside that talked a lot about the 1967 Montreal Expo and the 1976 Olympics, two events which the authorities are still raving about.

From the top of the chapel, we could see people riding around on these weird 2-wheel things that looked halfway between a manual mower and a pogo stick. We checked it out at the waterfront that afternoon - they're gyroscopically controlled so you just lean in the direction you want to go. It looked like heaps of fun; too bad we were all pretty tired and we would have had to wait 2 hours to get a go (and the Robbins' are a bunch of wusses when it comes to rides ;-).

An apartment complex called Habitat 67, which is considered an eye-sore by many locals. It's a conglomerate of more than 100 apartments arranged in cubes in such a way that the windows of any apartment aren't looking into the windows of any other apartment. The result looks like something hornets built.

The Basilica de Notre Dame. Half the churches in Montreal seem to be called Notre Dame ("Our Lady" ie Mary) but this is the big bad one. Built in the 1800's when they had plenty of money, everything is covered in gold. The contrast between Marguerite's relatively humble chapel and this behemoth monument to the greatness of God (amongst other mortals who apparently thought they were pretty good too, including the musketeering founder of Montreal, Paul de Chomedey, of whom there is a pedestal statue in the square in front of the basilica) is marked. The building sports "fake" gothic architecture, including a cylindrical internal roof that isn't actually weight-bearing because they had figured out how to do A-frame roofs by then.

Inside the Basilica, a wooden staircase winds to the top of the intricately-decorated pulpit. A great vantage point from which to give a sermon to the masses - and I doubt too many of them would contradict you either.

The light was low inside, so I turned off my camera flash and used longer exposure - pardon the not-terribly-steady hands. The organ over the entrace was very impressive. Still, I didn't feel like I was in a particularly "holy" place, rather than a place that was designed to impress and even scare into submission. I thought this was a really interesting place, not least as an example of what the church saw fit to do with money in the 1800's. I'd go to a classical music concert here, but I wouldn't want to go to a wedding - too weird having a statue behind the altar of Abraham about to sacrifice his son.

Anyway, we actually did heaps more than this, but couldn't take photos inside the museums. One museum on the waterfront had an entire subterranian layer where they'd unearthed the foundations of early Montreal buildings. One spot used to be the governor's house, and now it has the main museum building, and then you can walk under the street through an old sewer (cleaned up of course ;-) through to the remains of a fountain square that also used to have, at various times, a guard house, a warehouse, and a gate into the city.

Anyway, blogger is about the crash on me so hitting "publish" now...
Cheers
Ben

medical potatoes & NY

We're several posts behind, so I thought I get in start...

Mother and I went for a meditation weekend down in Virginia from the 4th - 7th. It was just what I needed! We meditated and walked in the woods (beautiful clean fresh air!!!) and ate zone balanced meals and had some massage. For those who don't know we do a form of high-tech meditation which involves sitting and listening to a sound-track.



There were lots of lovely blue insects (this photo mother actually took somewhere else for me).



Including Giant BEES! (Also in Montreal where this was taken : )

From Virginia, we took the train up to Montreal to meet with lumpy & Da. Our plan was to take train to New York city, arriving in the afternoon, see a bit of the city and then the next day take a train to Montreal...

When we got to the train station at 6 am (an hours drive from where we were staying) we found that they train would be TWO hours late!
The lady behind the counter who was just putting out the sign to tell us this said "you should have called!".
I asked "you mean yesterday?"
"Oh no" she says "yesterday they train wouldn't have left New Orleans yet!"
"So when should we have called?" I asked.
She thought for a moment. "About 1 am."
: p
Strangely there were a lot of people who hadn't called...

So anyway we went to find some breakfast, and loudly discussed global warming (my current strategy is to loudly discuss what people can do about it in the hope that some might take up a suggestion or two! : ).

But we got into NY late (and tired) so we didn't really have time to see anything. We did walk around and look at architecture a bit (and made a brief foray to Time Square before deciding it was too noisy and full of tourists).

The next train left on time, but was held up at the border while two young gentlemen were escorted off... (Who knows why, but the train left without them.)

We arrived in Montreal slightly AFTER the menfolk instead of before them as originally planned! Montreal will be the next post!

(While we were away my lovely husband and father put up curtains in the living-room! : )

p.s. Medical Potatoes is what lumpy calls meditation I'm not really sure why except that it sounds vaguely similar...