Sarah and Ian's Move to Ottawa

The story so far...having planned and booked a three month trip to South America, we were given a difficult decision to make when Ian was offered a job in Canada. After much hard thinking, we took the job, but get the best of both worlds as we still have two weeks in Brazil and Chile before arriving in Ottawa. We are now living in Ottawa and enjoying the big adventure of living somewhere new. This is the story of our experience...

Saturday, April 30, 2005

God Doesn’t Play Slots

Today we hired a car and drove out to the Hoover Dam. The scenery is all desert from Vegas to Boulder City where Hoover Dam is. At the dam we took the guided tour and saw the generators at the base of the dam and the story of how the dam was built. It was constructed during the depression of the 1930s so finding cheap labour was easy even given the dangerous working conditions. The dam was made by making tunnels in the surrounding rock around the dam site. The river was then diverted through the tunnels by blasting rock into the river, raising the river bed level until the water flowed around the site of the dam. The blasting of rock was a really dangerous job. Guys would be hanging from rope, they would light the fuse on sticks of dynamite, shove the dynamite into a hole drilled into the rock and then they would swing sideways on the rope and hope they timed it right so that didn’t swing back as the dynamite exploded.

Once the river had been diverted it was a simple matter of pouring tons and tons of cement, only the desert temperatures of more than 400C meant the cement wouldn’t set and so had be cooled with water. The dam is half in Nevada and half in Arizona. I was in a right state, or the left state depending on which way you are facing, when I stood across the state line.

Back in Vegas we drove to the sister hotel and did some recognisance for Sarah’s parents and then drove to Rio hotel. This hotel doesn’t get as much interest as the others we’ve talked about as it is not on the Strip, but they do have a good free show with carnival floats with dancing girls floating around the casino above the fruit machines and card tables. After Rio we drove to downtown Las Vegas, which is where the original casinos were built. There is a great light show on Fremont Street that has 8 million lights and 540,000 watts of surround sound. The casinos here are a lot nearer to each other than the ones on the Strip so it was nice not to have to walk too far. The street shows aren’t so good though. We came across a guy preaching by way of a quiz. He started off giving away money to people who could answer easy questions. I took a dollar off him for knowing that the capital of Australia is Canberra. Naturally we did the right thing with the religious man’s money and lost it in a slot machine. On our way back to the car we saw the preacher still with a crowd around him and we were pleasantly surprised to see that he was having a philosophical/religious to and thro’ with a gang of teenage boys from the hood. They knew more bible quotes than Dot Cotton.

Back at the Strip we tried the Venetian for a $5 black jack table, but again couldn’t find one so we went to Excalibur to play. We were down to our last $5 (from $40), but won back to $80 and we gave the croupier $15 tip. Back at the hotel we watched tv for a bit to relax.

Thursday, April 28, 2005

Europe in One Day

There is no courtesy bus on a Thursday from our hotel to the Strip so instead we got public bus to Tropicana and then walked to Excalibur for a Black Jack lesson. We didn’t realise that the dealers are actually there to help you and will advise you against doing anything very, very stupid and in return you are supposed to tip them. We learnt a few things about strategy and generally how to play so it was useful to have the lesson. Afterwards we walked to Monte Carlo and I made Sarah laugh and get cross by walking out of step with her. Sarah likes it that when we walk together our inside legs step together and then our outside legs step together. To annoy her, I shuffle one step so that our left and right legs step together. Sarah then tries to shuffle a step so we go back to how we were, but I do a double shuffle and we end up left and right in synch. We have some fun!

From Monte Carlo we got the monorail to Bellagios Hotel and crossed the Strip to have lunch at the Flamingo. From there we explored Caesars Palace, THE Vegas casino. Easily the largest hotel and casino and the site of World famous boxing matches and concerts. The casino has over 100 card tables and fruit machines that cost $500 a go. There’s a life size copy of Michelangelo’s David and, in the shopping mall with fake sky there’s an animatronic statue display that tells a story of the fall of Atlantis. We did some shopping in Caesar’s Palace as Gap had a sale on so I bought two shirts and some socks for less than $30. Bargain! One of the highlights for us was an empty courtyard outside Caesars that will be the stadium for the reality boxing tv series we’ve been watching called The Contender.

We left Caesar’s and walked to Mirage and saw Sigfreid and Roy’s (tacky Vegas magicians) white tiger and felt bad because our being there only encouraged them to keep animals in inhumane conditions.

We left the tiger pacing around its cage and went to the Venetian hotel. The outside of the Venetian is styled as the Doge’s palace and St. Mark’s square and the Rialto Bridge. If this isn’t enough to make you homesick for Europe, then inside the lobby has a beautifully frescoed ceiling and the shopping mall has the Grand Canal flowing it. Wonderful. We didn’t buy anything here, but did wander into an art gallery and had an impromptu escorted tour from one of the sales assistants. Whilst telling us about the paintings and artists, we explained we are from the UK and she was thrilled by this as she had apparently named her children after places in the UK. Her eldest’s middle name was London and her second was called Devon, though she did admit that she knew it was really Devonshire (news to me). The gallery assistant wasn’t planning to have more children as she’d run out of nice place names from the UK, so when her third child showed up she called it (don’t know whether it was a boy or girl) Skye, after the Isle of Skye. She must have been pulling her hair out when she got pregnant for a fourth time, but she settled on Hadrian after the wall.

After the Venetian we went to the disappointing new Wynn hotel and had a look inside. It was ok, but we decided it was lacking a theme. Sarah did find a really nice bag shop (surprise, surprise), but decided against a purchase as the bag she liked was $1370! On the way to Paris we saw the Mirage Volcano erupt. Paris has the same fake sky and boulevards as Caesar’s and the Venetian and by now it was old hat so we carried on down the Strip to Tropicana to watch a revue show. This was an odd mix of topless ladies (they had no clothes on top half of their bodies) and a comedy juggler.

We fancied doing a bit of gambling so went to MGM’s, but they didn’t have any $5 minimum bet tables. They had $1000 minimum bet tables but we didn’t feel that like trying our luck that much.

Flights, Fore, Fantasy

No lie in for us today, we were up at 6:30 to take a helicopter ride to the Grand Canyon! Yes, Sarah actually got in a helicopter, a very small, flimsy helicopter that felt like it was dangling from a thread as we bobbed along, praying that the Perspex door I was pressed up against wouldn’t pop open at 5,000ft.

Captain Chris flew us over the Hoover Dam on the way to the Grand Canyon and over Lake Mead, the lake created by the Dam and the largest lake in North America. We didn’t fly very far along the canyon, but it’s hard to see the full 227 miles of the canyon’s length in one flight. We did fly over the canyon’s rim and landed at the base, 1 mile below the rim. It lived up to its name as it was huge whether we looked at it from the canyon floor or from above in the helicopter. The canyon is 6 million years old (glad we didn’t turn up last year when it was only 5,999,999 years old!) and has formed because the Colorado River and the desert winds have eroded the soft rock. It was interesting to see the Grand Canyon and we would have liked more time to appreciate it, but the trip was more about riding in a helicopter than see some hole in the ground.

Back at the hotel, we went for a quick swim. A very quick swim as the water was very cold and again got the 2pm shuttle bus to the Strip and walked to the Bali Hai golf club. This is a bit of an expensive course to play, but we thought we’d treat ourselves and we wanted to get pictures of the Strip from the golf course so this limited our choice. Sarah doesn’t play golf but loves driving the buggies. At least this time she managed to confine her skids to the remote fairways and not right in front of the club house as she’d done in Morocco.

We were asked to join up with another couple, Mike and Beverley from “DC”. Like us, Mike was golfing and Beverley was driving the buggy. It was a well presented and difficult course, but we had a good time and I played quite well.

After the golf we got a taxi with Mike and Beverley to Harrah’s hotel half way up the Strip. Sarah and I walked to the Fashion Mall shopping centre, which looks like it is just a few shops when you see it form the road, but is at least the size of Blue Water inside. We had Chinese meal from a food court and then walked to Frontier casino to go to Gilley’s Western Bar to have some good clean fun at the women’s mud wrestling competition. We knew the wrestling started at 10pm and, being the organised people we are we got there at 9:30pm, just as the entrance fee period started. Grr! What made us more annoyed was that there were no seats available, the music was horrendously loud and the mud wrestling started an hour late. I made it worse by pointing out that the bar was being run by a bunch of cowboys!

I was disappointed with the mud wrestling as we didn’t see a single drop-kick, clothes-line or sleeper hold, so after a couple of bouts we left and walked to the new Wynn Hotel for the grand opening. Steve Wynn, the owner of the new hotel, has pretty much built all the famous hotels in Vegas, it’s his play town. There were huge crowds outside and we waited expectantly for a big fireworks show when the hotel opened at midnight. Vegas is all about glitz and razzamatazz everyday of the year so we expected something special for the opening of a new casino. Boy did we get a surprise; the only fireworks were on the big advertising screen outside the hotel and lasted a full five seconds and that was it. Very disappointing and to make matters worse, the huge crowds pilling onto the roads made it really difficult to get a taxi home. We eventually persuaded Mike-the-Greek to give us a ride home and we listened to him tell how he hated Vegas because it was corrupted by the mob (He actually said “Trusts me. I knows people.”), how he never gambled (“Is all fixed”), how he was going to move back to Greece, and how he’d lived in Vegas for a mere 26 years.

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Food and Looting In Las Vegas

We had a bit more a lie in this morning and again got the 2pm shuttle bus to New York New York hotel on the Strip and went across to Excalibur to book for the medieval banquet dinner.

We then went back to NYNY to get the trolley bus up to the far end of the Strip. We thought we’d try the trolley bus as it would go along the Strip as opposed to behind the hotels like the monorail had. This turned out to be a VERY bad decision as the bus went into the driveway of every hotel. After 40 minutes we’d been to Excalibur, Luxor, Mandalay Bay, Tropicana and MGM Grand…which is right across the road from NYNY! We’d invested lots of time on the dam trolley bus now and so decided to stick with it, which was another bad decision as it just made us more and more angry that we were having to change our plans and maybe not do some hotels just because of this shitty little bus. We wanted to go to the Stratosphere hotel, the tallest in Vegas and do the Big Shot ride at the top of the tower, but the final straw for the trolley came when, with Stratosphere in sight, the driver turned off the Strip and headed round the back of a hotel and then back down the Strip. It was 5pm and we hadn’t done anything.

Abandoning Stratosphere, we walked to Circus Circus and cheered ourselves up with an icecream and a free circus show featuring a clown, acrobats and a magician. After the show we tried the funfair games in the casino and won a monkey by bashing chickens into cooking pots. I’ve just read that back and realised it sounds like animal abuse, but these were rubber chickens and the pots were not on a stove.

Walking back along the Strip we stopped at Treasure Island hotel to watch the mock pirate battle, another free show. This was amazing as there were fireworks and explosions going off and they actually sank one of the pirate ships. After the battle we had to march quickly past Caesars Palace and Bellagios hotels to get the Excalibur for the banquet. We caught the fountain show in the lake outside Bellagios. This is yet another free show and features hundreds of fountains set to music with the glamorous hotel as a backdrop.

The Tournament of Kings banquet is held under the Excalibur casino and has an arena the size of a football pitch surrounded by tiered benches where we ate our dinner with our fingers. We were sitting in the King of France’s section. There were 8 Kings and Emperors from around Europe and we cheered when our monarch battled at jousting, sword fighting and horse racing. The serving wenches sang and some acrobats performed for us, but the dinner was interrupted by the evil Mordor who slayed King Arthur and was then slain himself by Arthur’s son Christopher.

After the dinner show we walked to Monte Carlo casino and won $30 at blackjack, so in the end we had a good day.

Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Bright Lights, Excalibur…Action

Despite the really nice room and extra comfy bed we didn’t get the lie in we needed as the curtains were very thin and the sunlight woke us up. Still, we were excited and the adrenalin would get us through the day.

We knew that Vegas is a 24hour city and is at its liveliest in the evenings, so we had a lazy morning at the hotel and got the 2pm shuttle bus to the famous Strip. We began at the Southern end of the 4km long Strip. The hotels are huge and loom out of the desert as you drive into town. The rest of Vegas seems to be bungalows compared to the extravagant hotels on the Strip. The first hotel/casino we went into was MGM Grand. The ringing of fruit machines and cheers from betting tables hits you as soon as you enter. We’d heard that there are no windows in Vegas casinos so that punters lose track of time and spend more time losing money. Sure enough there was only artificial lighting inside, mainly from the thousands of fruit machines as far as the eye could see (actual visible distance about 200 metres due to low lighting conditions).
A hotel doesn’t last long in Vegas if it doesn’t have a theme. The MGM logo is a lion, the one that roars at the start of MGM films, so it shouldn’t have been a surprise when we found two lionesses in a glass enclosure right inside the casino! We were realising very quickly that Vegas is all about separating you from your money (but in the most entertaining way so you didn’t feel bad about it), so weren’t further surprised to find that we could have our picture taken with three lion cubs…for $25 each (person not cub).

From MGM Grand we took the monorail its full journey to get our bearings of the city. We were disappointed that the monorail went round the back of the hotels and casinos and didn’t give us a better view of the Strip, but it did whet our appetite. We got off back at MGM Grand and decided to walk out to the end of the Strip to the famous Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign. On the way we came across a small chapel and saw a couple getting married. We knew you could get married in Vegas and were excited that we’d seen a wedding on our very first day in town. We soon realised that a Vegas wedding wasn’t such a rare occurrence because when we got to the Vegas sign there was another couple getting their wedding photos taken under the sign.

Nearby to the virginal weddings we found newspaper bins only they didn’t contain newspapers. Instead we found brochures for call-girls, apparently they were available to come to the privacy of your hotel room.

On the way back up the Strip we went into Mandalay Bay, Luxor, Excalibur and Tropicana hotels. Mandalay Bay has a tropical island feel to it, with lots of water features in the hotel and gardens and huge shark reef aquarium. We saw our first scantily clad cocktail waitresses and thought that this hotel must have the edge over the others because of this (naïve? Us?). We had our first go at the fruit machines in Mandalay Bay. We put $2 in, got down to 50 cents and then won 20 cents so Sarah said we should quit.

Luxor, as it’s name suggests is based on ancient Egypt. The hotel and casino (invariably one building) is a huge pyramid with blacked glass covering the exterior. There’s a 100ft Sphinx outside the hotel and the entrance lobby is styled as a pharaoh’s temple. To give you an idea of the size of these hotels, the Luxor pyramid can house nine 747 aeroplanes! Oh, but what I liked most about Luxor hotel was that, purely for the sake of doing it, at the apex of the pyramid, pointing straight up into the sky, is a light beam equivalent to 4 billion candle power. It is so powerful that airline pilots can see it from 200 miles away and astronauts (and aliens, provided they have developed eyes that detect electromagnetic waves in the band from 400-800nm) can see it 10 miles away in space!

Excalibur has a medieval theme. The hotel is shaped like a castle and the prime entertainment is the tournament of kings medieval banquet. We noticed that the waitress’ were just as scantily clad as those at Mandalay Bay and realised that maybe a good idea travels quickly in this town. We didn’t eat at the medieval banquet, instead choosing the more modern delights of Sherwood Forest restaurant.

Our last stop was the Tropicana hotel. Not as extravagant as the others we’d visited and we thought it could do with a good clean inside. Our reason for lowering our standards was a free show. We had a bit of trouble finding where the show would be performed until a nice member of staff pointed out that the show would take place above the fruit machines! This was so that people wouldn’t have to take time away from the machines in order to see the show. Always thinking, you see. Anyway, this show was called AirPlay and was an acrobatics show. There were three acts, a couple who were out to prove they were fantastic in the bedroom, a woman who could hula with any part of her body and a couple of guys who flung each other around whilst barely hanging on to a one handed moving trapeze.

Monday, April 25, 2005

Welcome to Vegas

After a sad goodbye to our friends from home we boarded yet another plane and headed for the bright lights of Vegas. We arrived at midnight to find the airport absolutely heaving with people and were sorely tempted to try our luck on the slot machines by the boarding gate we arrived into!!

We jumped into a taxi (after a long, but orderly and surprisingly quick queue – which Sarah appreciated) we arrived at the timeshare apartment that we were staying at for the week (courtesy of Sarah’s parents – thank-you again). The apartment was fabulous with kitchen, dining room, lounge, utility room, huge bathroom and bedroom with a walk-in wardrobe. It’s better than the apartment we’re living in in Ottawa! We were both hungry so walked to the 24 hour garage to get some food where we got talking to the cashier who proceeded to tell us his life story. He told us that he was adopted and originally his birth parents were from Ireland. The strange thing was that he was the second person in the space of thirty minutes to tell us their life story and that they were adopted. The taxi driver did the same thing. Most odd. After stuffing ourselves with boiled noodles we rolled into bed at 3am (6am Atlanta time).

Sunday, April 24, 2005

International Relations

We are now in South Carolina in the US. Craig and Wendy caught a midday flight on Thursday from Ottawa to Atlanta and we followed them down in the evening. Our flight went via Toronto and we had a bit of trouble finding the hotel in Atlanta so it was late when we arrived and met up with Craig and Wendy and Stephen and Anne who’d flown in from the UK via a week in New York with their friends Pete and Tony.

The reason we all met up in Atlanta was because our friend Lee was marrying his USA girl, Mel. The wedding was in Mel’s home town so after the six of us had had breakfast in a mall we drove the couple of hours to Clemson, South Carolina.

We arrived at the hotel in Clemson at around lunchtime on Friday. We’d just got into our rooms when the phone rang and the receptionist told us we all had to go to the lobby as there had been a tornado warning! Naturally I grabbed our camera and ran outside looking for the twister. We must have been on the edge of the storm though as we just had a really bad downpour of rain for half an hour. We were worried that the weather might be bad for the wedding on Saturday, especially when, at Mel’s Uncle’s BBQ that evening we found out that the Southern states gets 15~20 tornados a month in April and May!

Mel didn’t seem concerned though and in the end the weather was wonderful for the whole wedding day. The ceremony was held in Clemson Botanical gardens and the reception was held in a marquee and the Botanical Gardens country house. Mel looked wonderful in her wedding dress, always a good choice of outfit for a wedding day, and even Lee scrubbed up well. The ceremony was moving, with readings from one of the bridesmaids and one of the groomsmen. Certainly it was too much for Lee as he tried to hold back the tears of joy when he saw Mel walking down the aisle. A day to remember. (See album 9a).

On Sunday we left Lee and Mel to enjoy the start of married life and the rest of the UK gang drove back to Atlanta to have a look round the city for a few hours before flying our separate ways. We went to the Cyclorama, a 40ft by 100ft oil painting of the American civil war and to the World of Coke (Coca-Cola was invented in Atlanta). It was really nice to meet up with our friends from the UK and Sarah got teary and very homesick when we said goodbye.

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Winning Chants

Sarah and I wanted to take Craig and Wendy to a typically Canadian event. Unfortunately, the timing didn’t work and we weren’t able to go to an Ice Hockey match, so we went to a baseball game instead. It was mine and Sarah’s first baseball game too so everyone was looking forward to it.

Ottawa’s baseball team is called the Lynx. They aren’t a major league baseball team, but this is great news for fans as the smaller stadium means you are really close to the game. The attendance wasn’t great, possibly because the game was on a weekday evening, and this meant that the crowd was mostly quiet as they didn’t want to be singled out or have conversations overheard. As with all North American sporting events, there was a mascot, a Lynx cat called Scratch and he did his best to excite and entertain the crowd. He danced and waved and, well danced, but his most entertaining performance was when he tried to beat up a teenager in the crowd who had pulled his tail. It can’t be easy trying to fight whilst wearing a huge padded cat-like suit. Certainly the teenager was laughing, not crying, which only aggravated Scratch all the more.

The game itself was pretty slow. Each pitch only lasting a couple of seconds if the batter hit the ball and a fraction of a second if he missed. And there are long pauses between pitches while the pitcher and new batter get set up, teams huddle to talk tactics and other stuff that is probably really important to the game but we didn’t understand it. So the club owners do their best to keep crowds entertained. As well as Scratch and his cushioned physical abuse of the crowd, there was a kids musical chairs competition, fan-who-travelled-the-farthest competition (some guy from Oz beat Craig and Wendy) and our personal favourite was the mini umpires’ refreshment van (the van was mini, not the umpires, as you’ll see in photos 9).

The Lynx were losing midway through the game and didn’t look like they could come back to win. The crowd was doing its best to inspire the team and cheered every good play loudly, but the greatest effect the crowd had was on the opposition (Scranton Red Barons). A section of the crowd had picked out one of Scranton’s best batters and every time he stepped up to bat they would chant his name in a long, low tone. Hhhhooowwwaarrrdd, hhhooowwwaaaRRRDDD. You could almost see this poor guy crying as he stood to bat. It worked as well as Howard only hit the ball once all night. We felt so sorry for him that when he made his one hit in the last innings, we were cheering for him and we were really sad after he’d made it round the third base and was running for home when his teammate got caught, ending the innings before Howard could score a run.

For the record, Ottawa did come back to win the game 10-7.

Saturday, April 16, 2005

Who's the Cutepest?

We'd not found a bear or a beaver in the Gatineau park, though we had seen quite a lot of animals. Our luck with seeing nature continued this morning when Craig looked out the bathroom window and saw a raccoon in the garden next to our flat! I know Ottawa isn't a huge place, but we do live in the city you know, so we never expected to see a raccoon so nearby. After watching the raccoon until he went round the corner to tell his mate that there were Brits round there looking at him, Sarah and I went out to try and find the cuddly critters. We weren't successful but we did have a chat with a neighbour who told us that raccoons are fairly common in cities as they dig through rubbish looking for food. They love fried chicken apparently.

Friday, April 15, 2005

Can’t Bear Nature

This message is actually post dated. I’ve entered it as if it were written on 16th April as that was the day these events took place but it was actually written on 9th May because Sarah and I have had a really busy couple of weeks (more on that later).

I was able to get today off work, which was great as it meant we could celebrate Craig’s birthday and have a long weekend together. Craig and Wendy like the great outdoors, well Wendy does, Craig just likes curries. Ottawa has a national park called Gatineau right on our doorstep so we decided to set off in search of beavers and bears.

I didn’t really expect to see bears so close to a city and we joked about which of us would be the slowest runner should we come across a bear (that’s one way to make them angry). I changed my tune when we got to the welcome centre and was told that black bears had been seen by walkers yesterday in the area we were going to. Hmm. Armed with our camera tripod and a pamphlet on what to do if we saw a black bear we set off into the woods.

The reassuring sound of traffic was soon replaced by the scarily unfamiliar sounds of nature. The first creature we heard and eventually saw was a woodpecker. An interesting bird with a bright red head that was most importantly not a threat to us. A few minutes later I heard some rustling of leaves, which I assumed was Sarah walking behind me (they always pick a group off by going for the ones at the back first), but Sarah’s shout told me otherwise. Sarah had disturbed three snakes, each about a metre long with a couple of green stripes down their length. We didn’t have a pamphlet of how to do deal with metre long snakes so we got really close to them and took lots of photos (see album 9).

We were heading for an area in Gatineau called Pink Lake, just because it sounded pretty. A few minutes walk after we left the snakes blinded by camera flashes we found a lake. It was over grown with weeds and looked very untended and not at all pink. It wasn’t very large either but we set up the tripod and got the obligatory photos before deciding to walk around the lake. We were a quarter of the way around the lake when we noticed a parking lot through the trees. Heading over to the parking lot we saw that the reason it was there was so people could easily get to the large and very pretty tree lined lake just the other side of the car park.

It took us an hour or so to walk around the real Pink Lake and we saw a red squirrel, some mallards and a chipmunk, but no bears. Craig wanted to prove he is still crazy even though he’s old now and so walked out onto the frozen lake. Wendy joined him and Sarah has asked me not to mention the cracking sound when she also got onto the ice.

With the lake being frozen we couldn’t tell if it was pink or not, but we did find out that it is a rather special lake. The sides are so steep and protected and the lake is so deep that the water at the bottom of the lake has remained unchanged since prehistoric times. Also, because there is no mixing of the lakes waters, no oxygen gets below 300m depth so any creatures found at the lake bottom must breath another gas. They’d be like aliens! Sadly we didn’t get a photo of them, but we did get a photo of a deer at the edge of the national park next to the road and later this evening we saw a rabbit in downtown Ottawa and when we dropped Craig and Wendy off at the train station Sarah and I saw a groundhog burrowing into the ground on a traffic island. AND when we dropped Craig and Wendy off at the train station Sarah and I saw a groundhog burrowing into the ground on a traffic island…

Guest Restaurant Review

We've got friends staying with us at the moment. Craig and Wendy are here! I've asked Craig to write a review of the Light of India restaurant that we went to tonight. Over to Craig...

A fantastic restaurant where time takes on a new dimension, the waiter said our table would be two minutes, but on my watch it was ten!

The dips served with the popadoms were lethal...Lovely!

Main course selection, fantastic.

Spice rating 11/10

Drinks rating 12/10

Doggy bag provision needed... 13/10

Company rating 14/10

A fantastic night!!!

Cheers Craigy. I'm glad your mouth could handle it.

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Ov’rawed-teen

Everybody should have good neighbours. They should, but they don’t always get them. The house we’ve moved into has seven other apartments in it. The building is old and whilst that makes for quaint features like sloping dining room floors, it also means that the walls and floors are thin. Too thin. There is a family with two young kids in the flat above us and every night we hear them stomping on their hardwood floors. They must be trying to get their 10,000 steps a day in as they walk almost constantly up and down the hall. We know that kids have got a lot of energy and will jump around a lot but these kids must weigh a ton because they made the lightshades in our dining room rattle when they jump on the floor. Very annoying.

Things got worse at about 7pm tonight. Instead of the usual stomping we heard one of the children yelling. At first we couldn’t tell if he was yelling because he was over excited, but it was apparent that the yelling was because his father was telling him off (presumably because the kid was making too much noise!). The boy got louder and Sarah and I went to our front door to investigate as the noise so loud it sounded like the father was beating his son. We could hear kicking and punching on doors and swearing and screaming. I went up stairs and the father who was trying desperately to quieten the boy smiled a meek apology as if to say, “what can I do?”. I thought of suggesting giving the kid some Ovaltine (do you see what I did with the title?) to calm him down, but I guessed this wouldn’t have down too well. By this time the residents in the other apartments had come to investigate, even the guy who lives in the basement was disturbed by the noise.

Eventually, after an hour the kid stopped trying to rupture his own lungs. Unfortunately he went back to hallway stomping. I’d had a bad day at work and although Sarah and I had said we would phone the management company tomorrow, I’d had enough so I went upstairs again to complain. I knocked on the front door. No answer. I tried again as maybe they couldn’t hear me over the stomping. Still no answer. I tried a third time harder and again there was no answer, but I heard the father shushing his kids to be quiet so he didn’t have to answer the door! I couldn’t believe it. How could he think that I would believe nobody was home? I knocked louder a couple more times but it was obvious nobody was going to come to the door. At least it scared the kids for a while as they were quiet after that.

I’ve used my God given jurisdiction as President and Commander in Chief of Ottawaville to declare the kids to be part of the axis of evil. This means that they now have no rights in international law and I am obliged to imprison them without trial and to torture them for not respecting thou mother and father, which is akin to treason. I haven’t turned this into a Holy war yet, but I might as it will help my re-election at the end of the year.

Sunday, April 03, 2005

One Eyed Hero

Today started in fine style. I turned to give Sarah a kiss in bed and turning to meet me, Sarah poked her thumb into my left eye!

When I’d regained my sight, we went for breakfast in the hotel café, then packed our bags in Mica and walked to the old quarter of Montreal. Montreal is one of the oldest cities in North America having been founded in 1642. There’s been lots of development since the 17th century but the old quarter around the port still has many original buildings. My favourite monument in the old town is the last thing you’d expect in a proudly French city: a statue of Admiral Lord Nelson. To further grate the French, the Montreal Nelson statue was the first erected anywhere in the World to commemorate the victory over Napoleon. AND the money wasn’t raised by patriotic British Montrealers, but by the Sulpician priests who didn’t care for the short emperor and who were engaged in delicate land negotiations with the British government at the time. The French jumping on the winning band wagon? Surely not.

On our way to the Notre Dame cathedral we came across a film set and got a bit of an insight into the glamour our Hollywood. We didn’t care for it much as nothing happened for a good fifteen minutes, then someone shouted “action”, four people walked out of a hotel and got in a car and drove away, only as far as being out of the shot and that was it, more waiting around. The clapper board said the movie was called “W.B.O.” so we’ll look out to avoid that one!

Notre Dame cathedral is beautiful at anytime but this was particularly poignant as Pope John Paul II had passed away this weekend. The Pope had visited Montreal and the basilica in the 1980s and there were lots of pictures and shrines to the him inside. We lit a candle.

Before going back to Ottawa we had lunch and got a taste of how diverse Canada is. We ate in an Italian restaurant that had English farmhouse décor and Spanish music playing and we were in a French city! I ordered for Sarah, but wont be doing it again as the food was too spicy.

Saturday, April 02, 2005

Challenging Feet

Before we left the UK I got Sarah a pedometer to measure how far we walk each day. Don’t worry, I didn’t pay for it. It was free from Walkers crisps (known as Lays in North America). It found its way into our suitcase and as I’ve put on a stone since moving here I decided to see if I do the 10,000 steps a day needed to lose weight. 300 steps before we left the flat was a good start and apparently I made 30 steps whilst driving to Montreal. I found that getting coins out of my pocket is equivalent to 7 steps and pulling my trousers up is 5 steps.

Even allowing for getting $10 worth of change from my pocket and pulling my trousers up and down thirty times, I completed my 10,000 steps in the Eaton shopping mall. What was I to do now? I couldn’t risk over exercising so I had to just stop! I suggested that Sarah carry me back to the hotel. Sarah politely suggested that I should slide my feet rather than stepping and in that way we made it back to the hotel.

I did 24,845 steps over the weekend.

Mon Anniversaire

It was my birthday this week. My lovely wife made me waffles in bed (she made the waffles in the kitchen but served them to me in bed). This was a lovely gesture and made up for being woken at 7am by the DIY lovers in the flat above (I mean that they love doing home renovation, not that they please themselves sexually on their own. Though they do that too)

After my wafflingly versatile breakfast Sarah and I set off to Montreal for the weekend. I must be getting old because my mind finds it hard to fathom people speaking in a different language when I haven’t been on a plane, ferry or use my passport; we’re still, officially at least, in the same country!

It was raining when we left Ottawa for Mica’s (our car, keep up!) first long distance trip. It was raining even harder when we got to Montreal. This is Canada’s second largest city (second to Toronto) and is the second largest French speaking city in the world. Being such a large city it is easy to get out of the rain as they have an underground train network and a large section of downtown is joined with underground walkways or covered bridges between shopping malls. We had lunch in one mall and decided we should go above ground and see the city. We left the mall, crossed the road and went into a coffee shop for a hot chocolate!

After the hot chocolate we braved the rain and walked along St Catherine’s Street, Montreal’s main shopping street. The French influence was everywhere, but once we’d wiped that off our shoes we noticed the bright lights of all the strip clubs next to clothes shops.

A big change for us, instead of going for coffee, we found a pub and had a pint each. It was still raining when we left the pub so we looked for a nice restaurant. We chose Rosalie just off St Catherine’s Street. We wouldn’t normally review an out of Ottawa restaurant but this was superb. Wonderful food, great service and nice ambience. On the way back to our suite (we got an upgrade) I took photos of St Catherine’s Street shops lit up (see album). Honestly, I was focussing on the shops.