Sociable Us?

On Thursday our Canadian friends had a baby boy!! We visited the new family on Friday and the baby is gorgeous.

Yesterday was the Great Glebe Garage sale. We’d read about this in newspapers and seen adverts on lampposts, but we didn’t realise the scale of the Great garage sale. When we’d finally stirred and left the house at midday, the streets were packed with people. Almost every household had sorted through their attic and placed their junk on the roadside to be exchanged for other people’s junk. Whilst this was interesting to see, it did get in the way of our favourite weekend ritual of buying a newspaper, getting a hot-chocolate in a coffee shop and ignoring each other as we read through the paper.

After our a pleasurable hour of silent reading and people watching, we drove into town to watch another friend do the Ottawa 5 kilometre run. We wouldn’t even walk that far!

Then we went to the driving range as I wanted to practice for my round of golf today. It was early evening and although there didn’t seem to be any bodies of water around, there we loads of mosquitoes and I got bitten all over my arms and neck. I react badly to mossy bites, as you’ll remember from our Brazil trip and my arms are now all puffy and blotchy red. Nice! I really enjoyed the round of golf though.

Rude Rage

I learnt something while I was in the UK. When driving in Canada I have flashed my headlights to tell other drivers I am letting them go first, as you would in the UK. However, I have found that Canadian drivers don’t seem to understand and just sit there waiting for me drive. What I learnt in the UK from my Canadian colleagues is that flashing your headlights is considered extremely rude in Canada. I have unwittingly been insulting people all over Ottawa!

Tearful Return

On Friday last week I was told that I had to go on my first business trip. Where would be the best place to send a Brit who had only been in the country for a few months and might be feeling a bit homesick? Yes, the UK! Sarah wasn’t happy with my having to go because after Vegas I had been to hospital with chest pains and Sarah was worried that the pains might return (I’ve had it checked out by the doc and it is inflamed and I’m on anti-inflammatories), and cried at the thought of me going.

I made the most of the trip to the UK and my family came down to Hastings to see me. This was wonderful of them as it was a long drive and I wouldn’t have been able make the drive after work. We had a walk around the abbey in Battle and saw the site of the Battle of Hastings. This turned out to be a field. I don’t know what else I expected!

The hotel I stayed at was a little outside Battle down country lanes and only my colleague was insured on the hire car, so when I fancied going into the village one evening I had to walk. It was about 8pm when I left and the sun was still up. However, I misjudged how far the walk was and by the time I got to the village it was getting dark. I bought Sarah some of the trashy gossip magazines she loves and was walking back down the unlit lane, which had no pavements and had to jump into the bushes whenever a car drove past. I was nearly back to the hotel when a car came down the lane and stopped next to me. It was a police car and they asked me if I was ok and what I was doing jumping in and out of bushes in the dark with trashy gossip magazines. I told them I was walking back to the hotel and they insisted on giving me a lift. Thankfully they didn’t cuff me, even when I made an awful joke by asking them how much I owed them.

I got back to Ottawa on Friday evening and Sarah and I went out for a meal at Fratelli’s in our neighbourhood. Sarah had been there before with her cousin and had a better meal then, but the food was still nice and the atmosphere was intimate.

Yesterday we went to my boss’ wedding. He married his Italian fiancée in a lovely service. During the speeches at the reception, a letter was read out from the bride’s mother who was too ill to have travelled from Italy. It was a very touching letter and made Sarah cry.

Today we had a day out in town. I wanted to go and see Ottawa’s newest sculpture, the 20ft high lead statue of a spider outside the national art gallery. The statue has been getting a lot of publicity as it is very controversial. It cost $3.2M to make which annoys a lot of people, including Sarah and other people wonder what a spider has to got to do with Ottawa. I like it because it is controversial. We also visited Ottawa newest museum, the National War Museum. This is a really well presented museum and has lots of interesting exhibits. I rate museums on how often you would have to go back in order to see all the exhibits and the Canadian War Museum would take a least four visits, so is a good museum. I found the story of Anglo-French wars in Canada interesting. It all came down to a battle on the Plains of Abraham outside present day Quebec City where the British won and cut off the Western French army from supplies lines. What I hadn’t realised previously was that the war with France over Canada was in part responsible for the American Civil War: the British had heavily taxed the new Americas in order to finance the war in Canada. The Americans didn’t appreciate this and declared war on England. The Americans even tried to push North and had they won even a single battle North of the 49th parallel, Canada would just be another American state.

Sarah liked the hall of remembrance and cried at the letters and poignant stories from soldiers at war.

Friendly Spirit

We’ve had another visitor to stay. Sarah’s university friend Mark (he’s my friend too, it is just that Sarah met him at uni) had a business trip in Toronto and so took the opportunity to visit us afterwards. Mark likes sports so we were pleased that the local ice hockey team were doing well in the play-offs and were still playing and that we managed to get tickets. The team lost the game but we had a good time cheering them on.

Sarah did a good job as tour guide while I was at work and took Mark to some of the Tulip Festival sites. They went to Dow’s Lake and although the boating lake wasn’t supposed to open for another week, they told the attendant that Mark was only in town this week and he let them have a pedallo and they were the only ones on the lake. This was probably a good job as they spent most of time going round in circles getting nowhere fast.

Always wanting to show our guests a good time, on Friday night we took Mark on the Ghost and Gallows Haunted walk of Ottawa tour. Ottawa is a young city and hasn’t had a very turbulent past so the tour focussed mainly on the murder of Thomas Darcy McGee. McGee was a prominent politician in the mid 1800’s when Ottawa was in its infancy. He was reported well liked for a politician, though someone obviously took a dislike to him as he was shot dead in the doorway to his home. At the time of McGee’s murder, Canada was having a problem with an Irish contingent called the Fenians who planned to capture Canada and trade it with the British for Irish independence. The police fingered four Fenians for McGee’s murder, let three of them go and eventually pinned it all on a man called James Wheelan, despite there being very little evidence of his guilt and far more evidence of his innocence. He was then hung from the prison gallows and now supposedly haunts the gaol, which was shut down in the 1970s due to inhumane living conditions and is now a youth hostel. Incidentally, the gun that might have been used to kill Darcy McGee went for auction in Ottawa last week and was bought by a local museum in order to keep it in Canada.

Tulips in Town

We’ve discovered that Ottawa has a lot of festivals. Lots. In May there is a 3 week long Tulip Festival to commemorate Canadian help given to the Netherlands during World War Two. Not only did Canadian troops liberate the Netherlands, but some of the Dutch Royal Family lived in Ottawa during the war. In fact, one of the Dutch princesses was born here. So every year the Netherlands give some tulips, well quite a lot – about 100,000, to say thanks! Today we walked to Dow’s Lake and looked at the tulips! We also went to another Tulip Site at City Hall where they had lots of decorated wooden tulips. I was so taken with these that I insisted on painting one of my own, albeit a much smaller version. It took a lot longer than I thought but it was a masterpiece in the end. Sarah was a little embarrassed as I was the eldest artist at the painting table by at least 25 years!

You’ll Like it, But Not a Hot(-tub)

Today we checked out of one hotel and moved to New York, New York on the Strip as a treat. Our room wasn’t ready when we checked in so we left our luggage with the bellboys and went out to have lunch at Coco’s, between NYNY and Monte Carlo. When we got back to NYNY our room in the Empire State building was ready. The rollercoaster went right by our window and we’d got a deluxe room with a hot tub IN the bedroom! However, we were annoyed to find that the hot tub didn’t have a plug. Not to worry as I phoned house keeping and they said it would be fixed while we were out for the day.

Our first activity of the day was the magic show at Tropicana. On our way there we asked a young woman to take our picture in front of NYNY. She said she loved our accent and when we said we were from London, she said it fabulous that she’d met so many Englanders in Vegas (I’ve got a rant building up about language, but that will wait until a later posting). At the magic show there were small card tricks and big tricks where helicopters and trains, not so suddenly appeared on stage and tigers were made to appear and disappear. It’s sad to say that we weren’t wowed by it all. It was ok, but special effects in films have made us blasé about what we see.

(Note that we've added more Vegas photos to album 9a).

All the restaurants at Bellagios were fully booked so we ate at a Chinese restaurant outside Paris. The food was ok and we were lucky that we both ordered a beef dish as apparently they have five kitchens and it is not unheard of for desserts to arrive before your partner has had their starter. After the dinner we bought Paris balloon cocktail mugs and walked to MGMs to see the recording of a tv show, but we’d just missed the last recording for the day so instead went to Excalibur to find our $5 black jack table…and lost the $50 we’d made in the previous days. D’oh!

Back in our NYNY room, we found that the hot tub still didn’t have a plug, so I made an angry call to house keeping who apologised and said they would send someone there right away. It took fifteen minutes for the maintenance guy to show up and I was ready to demand our money back. I soon changed my tune when the guy should us that the tub had an internal plug and had been working all along!