OTTAWA, THE FIRST 4 DAYS, continued

aturday.
Well, it's now Sunday night, and I'm at home. Vacation is over, but I'll try to pick up where I left off.
Wednesday (cont.)
Ah yes, the Canadian Museum of Civilization. The Hall of First Peoples was unfortunately a little boring, if only due to the fact that there weren't many photo opportunities. After all, since I was stuck with the camera all day, I had been using it.
One thing that was interesting about it was an exhibit on their creation myths. The one pictured on the right is a model of a story of how the Skywoman fell down to the turtle's back and created Earth. There was also a weird story about the birth of good and evil, where they were twins, and good was born first, the natural way, and then evil was jealous so he escaped out his mother's side instead of waiting his turn. There was a sculpture, but let's just say I don't want to include nudity here.
After lunch in the cafeteria I took some pictures of the parliament buildings and such across the river from the lawn. Then we raced upstairs to make it to a performance of a play called "On the Edge" at 1:30.
There was only one actress, alternating between three different characters with different accents and outfits, but wow can that lady monologue. We weren't allowed to take pictures, but afterwards we toured the exhibit that the play was part of and were allowed to try on different historical costumes, including a lady's 1600s headdress that I thought was a lace ruff for the chin, but turned out to be a headdress, which in turn was inspired by Louis the Fourteenth's mistress wearing a garter, of all things, on her head, so as not be uncovered when her hat fell off. (Sheesh, what about revealing the fact that she wore a big lacy garter on her fat leg?) Since we were already on the second floor, we visited the Canadian Children's Museum. Wow, I wished that I was little again because I would have had so much fun there. Come to think of it, I did have fun there anyway, taking a zillion pictures of my brother against his will, posing him cutting plastic vegetables and wearing a kaftan and trying on carnival masks and riding a camel. Since he's 11, and thinks himself superior to others his age, he was none too thrilled, and I think in the end I had more fun than he did.
Afterwards was a quick stop in the postal museum where, among the unfortunately uninteresting to me stamp collections and postal code histories I found a gem: Lord of the Rings stamps from New Zealand! My friend Jillian will love this. Sorry about the resolution, I was taking it through glass. Also, there was a potentially interesting exhibit about the post in culture, including TV, movies (i.e. You've Got Mail, The Lake House, Cyrano de Bergerac), books, etc. Unfortunately, I was rushed off to the Hall of Canada on the 3rd floor because there was supposed to be another play in the Quebec square there at 4:30. It was only there that my mom more closely reexamined the schedule and discovered that the play was only from Thursday to Saturday. So my exploration of "The Post Goes Pop!" was tragically and unjustifiably cut short, and I decided to make the best of things and enjoy the Hall of Canada. Now, the Hall is incredibly impressive. When you come up the escalator, you look up and there's a beautiful multicolored glass dome above you with detailed, abstract patterns and pictures. Then you go through these doors into the start of the hall. For anyone who doesn't know what the Hall of Canada is, it's this massive gallery that takes you through Canada's history, while simultaneously moving west. (In terms of the history's place in geography) It started with life-sized models of a Viking woman saying goodbye to her husband as he got on a boat, and progressed through fishermen and whalers, villagers in a 1600s Quebec town, shipbuilding, the mainstreet of a small town, a country area, a cafe in Northwest Territories, and a 50s airport in British Columbia, before ending up with a helicopter that seemed to be in Yukon. All of this was represented with scenes, vehicles, props, etc, and there was even part of a real church that had been donated for the small town mainstreet. Also, while the only one we saw was in French,there were actors who wandered around their respective areas and pretended to be from that time and place.
Last we went to this special exhibit on the Greeks, which was pretty cool, only my feet were so sore by then that I didn't enjoy it as much as I wish I had. There was one pair of earrings from the Byzantine period that had little gold ships hanging from them! I swear, they must have weighted a ton.
We walked to a pizza restaurant after we finished up at the museum, and that was another adventure in and of itself. Perhaps I forgot to mention that though the museum of Civilization is only about 5 minutes away from Ottawa, it's across the Ottawa River in the town of Gatineau, which means that it's in Quebec. Where they speak French. And in this particular restaurant, the menu was in French only. I was actually really excited, because it meant that I got to put all my years of taking French to use, but we ran into a few speed bumps when we realised that most of the words I didn't know on the menu were for different kinds of meat, and so would not be useful in avoiding them. Luckily, our waiter turned out to be bilingual, but it did take a lot of the adventure out of the experience.
After eating we jogged on back to the museum for our IMAX show on Ancient Greece (can anyone guess that the museum had a sort of theme going here?) It was okay, but nothing really spectacular compared to others I've seen. (But then, how can you expect ruins and coastline to measure up to NASCAR-in 3D!)
And that was my very long Wednesday. As I'm getting bored right now and would rather go do something else (such as unpack and sleep), I'll have to continue tomorrow.

OTTAWA VACATION: THE FIRST 4 DAYS

Hi from Ottawa!
I've decided to liveblog (is that the right word?) my vacation to Ottawa...but unfortunately my internet access didn't work until tonight so it sort of defeats the purpose. Today is Friday, and I'm sitting in my tiny hotel room next to a bottle of pickles on the little desk.
So I'll try to recap what's happened so far.
Tuesday
We drove for 5 hours. Driving conditions were normal. Highpoints included eating donuts and watching Stardust on the DVD player. We arrived at Comfort Inn Downtown (not actually downtown), checked in, hiked up the stairs, marvelled at the room smaller than my bedroom, the lovely inadequate lighting, and the bathroom so small that when I sat down on the toilet I scraped my elbow.
We hiked around the city for two hours on my father's demand before eating supper. It was getting dark, we were disoriented, and I was unjustifiably terrified by buskers. Well, terrified is a bit of a strong word...but uneasy at least. We finally found a food court that was closing down and bought some ricotta and spinach pizza things that were surprisingly good.
Then we were walking through the city and came out in front of Parliament Hill, and wow! Suddenly, Ottawa wasn't that bad. The entire capital buildings were lit up in multi, changing colours, and there was loud electronic music, and then this presentation thing started, with clips and narrators and quotes and poems and stuff, all talking about what it means to be Canadian. It turns out the show is called "Sound & Light on Parliament Hill", and it's every night at 9:30 and 10:30. It was around that point that I decided Ottawa wasn't that bad, and at least for a little while stopped comparing it to Boston and San Francisco and Washington D.C.
Wednesday
The Canadian Museum of Civilization is now officially the coolest museum in Canada, in my eyes. It is also very hard on the feet. That's not an opinion, it's a fact. The entire museum looks as if it's eroded out of a sandstone hill or something, all natural curves and lines and waves. It's also nicely placed on a ridge on the edge of the Ottawa River, so when we ate lunch in the museum cafeteria we had a great view of the Parliament buildings, Chateau Laurier, etc.
Our first stop was the Great Hall, a huge hall full of totem poles (the largest collection of totem poles indoors in all of Canada...or the most important...or something like that). There were facades of West Coast Native dwellings on the side, and you could enter doors to see artifacts and stuff on the inside. Then there was an exhibit about a really ancient tribe (I can't remember exactly which one) that used so many shells that the soil contains layers and layers of them, just piles of broken ones, some of the layers as much as 8 feet thick!
Oh, I've got to go to bed now...to be continued, with the unfortunately rather boring Aboriginal Exhibit, and then the really cool monologue play.