OTTAWA VACATION: THURSDAY (since obviously I can't fit all the days in one post)

Thursday

On Thursday morning we were planning to go to the Canadian War Museum, the National Gallery, Parliament Hill, and ByWard Market. We ended up going to the Canadian War Museum. And the mall. It just goes to show that you should never try to cram too much into one day, especially considering my family's strange love of museums, and my mom's insistence and reading every single thing.

Architecturally and aesthetically the War Museum was exactly the opposite of the Museum of Civilization. The outside was all angles and cement, with a triangular prism of glass jutting off of one side of the roof. We accessed it from the parking garage, which made the whole thing seem like a bunker, and then took an elevator up to the main lobby. The entire thing was so nearly empty that it was scary. Our hands were stamped and then we went to this hall thing where there was a mural on the wall with words about war and such, and a big map in the middle of the museum. We started through the galleries; gallery one was about the wars before the 20th century: European-Native conflicts, the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, the Loyalists, the War of 1812, etc. Surprisingly, there was a video playing on one of the screens built into the wall that had clips from Canada: A People's History. I had a really scary 7th grade history class flashback...Also, I got to see Isaac Brock's coat with the bullet hole in it, and a wooden cannon. Whose bright idea was that?

Next was the Boer War and WWI gallery. Highlights included the trench that you could walk into, with recreated sounds, mortar blasts, and moody lighting. Sorry it looks so bright in the picture, but I kept flash on. The trenches were really horrible, and reading some of the stories about the atrocities was almost sickening. Slightly less serious, and really amazing, actually, was a mini-exhibit on life in the trenches, which was tied into by a entire exhibit of Trench Life that we would see later. What I thought was really cool was this art that soldiers made in the trenches because they were really bored. There was a model airplane made out of shrapnel and bullet casings, a shell casing made into a pitcher, and a carving done in a block of chalk that was taken from the side of the trench.

In the WWII gallery there were exhibits about D-Day, Sicily, and work on the Home Front, among others. We saw Hitler's limo, a huge amount of tanks (I think I must have taken at least 20 pictures of random tanks that day), a model of a house in Italy that had been taken over as a battlefield, and the kitchen from a house for war veterans coming back home and settling down. I liked reading about the home effort especially, which included ration stamps, children's board games, and propaganda posters.

Fourth was a gallery on the Cold War, the Korean War, Peacekeeping, etc. It ended with an echoing gallery where on either side there were stations where you could answer questions such as "What is war?", "Can we ever have peace?" and "When is killing justified?". In the middle there was a bilingual magnetic board where you could say what your fears for the future were. We went out from here into a small, round, room that opened onto all the galleries and briefly summarized Canada and war. In the center of it was a scale model of the War Memorial, the real thing which I will have a picture of later.

We went back to the introductory gallery and through this thing into the Regeneration Hall. You start at the top of these stairs. The walls slope and narrow in a sort of upside down 3-D "V" shape towards a narrow window that spans both stories. On the left, sloping wall, spaces have been punched out so that the sun shines through as the Morse code for "Lest We Forget". (I had a little question about this: Does it say "Lest We Forget" bilingually in Morse code, or just in English? I mean, how many people can read Morse code anyway. In fact, I had to wonder if the French brochure said it said N'oublions jamais, and the English one said that it said Lest we forget. I looked it up on the website; apparently it says both. Bilingual Morse code...you don't find that everyday.)

The hall is designed so that as you go down the stairs you get a fleeting view of the Peace Tower through the slit of a window, then it is blotted out, as peace is blotted out. But as you continue down the stairs, the statue of Hope, a plaster model of the one in Vimy, is illuminated from behind.

When you reach the bottom of the stairs, there are statues on your right representing Knowledge and Peace and Love and Mercy and such. You go through the doors and find yoursjelf in...a huge cavernours room filled with tanks and airplanes, sort of like the War Museum in Mt. Hope. It's a bit jarring, and I was thoroughly bored in this gallery, so I amused myself by finding tanks, cars, guns, etc that were pretty colours. I know, I know, I'm pathetic, but my feet *hurt* and the special exhibit I wanted to go to was closing soon, and my dad and brother were taking their own sweet time. So I found one pretty artillery-gun-thing that was powder blue and chocolate brown, and a tank that was painted white.

My mom and I eventually decided to go ahead to the special exhibit, Trench Life, that we wanted to see, because it closed at 4 and my bro and dad showed no signs of coming.

Trench life was both shocking and funny. The soldier's almost necessary callousness was scary; they often hung stuff on dead bodies jutting out of the sides, stole stuff from them, talked to them, etc. There were also funny and beautiful parts, like the pictures they drew and the graffiti they did. When they were on leave, a group of soldiers would put on comedy plays and sing and dance and such, and because there were no women, they would dress up as girls too. One captain fell in love with one of the girls dancing on stage, and had to be told that she was really a he. He spent the next month or so apologizing and making excuses!

In terms of tone, and the images and feelings it left you with, the other special exhibit we saw was exactly the opposite. Called "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race", it was about the Nazis and eugenics, and was sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It was horrifying how they applied Darwinism and the survival of the fittest to the human race, at first forbidding marriage between Jews and Nordics, and Nordics and "unfit people"--those who had defects, were sickly, or were not of high intelligence, then eventually sterilyzing "weak" or "inferior" people, and finally gassing--murdering millions of Jews, disabled people, and people in insane asylums, including children. They even killed people who were simply poor, calling them "feebleminded" because they couldn't answer questions of knowledge. Coming out of the exhibit, one feels stunned, or, as my mom put it, "Shell-shocked", a perhaps grimly appropriate description considering where we were.

After leaving the museum we went to a tiny vegetarian place in a mall in the middle of ByWard market that had been recommended by our guidebook.

After supper we got gelato at a place called Sugar Mountain (very kitschy, colorful, retro, and fun...you can practically smell the sugar). Then, being proper females, my mom and I went to Rideau Center mall and ooh-ed and ahh-ed over super expensive dresses, despite the fact that we only had $15 with us because my mom had left her wallet at the hotel.

In my next post: our busiest day yet, with mounties, parliament buildings, wampum birds, and hamburger feet!