Toronto; and the great Ottawa beaver hunt

Soooo, Toronto.

So, I said in my last post that i'd reserve my judgement on Toronto, until I'd spent a little more time there. Well, having spent a whole extra day, i'm now prepared to publish my unfair snap judgement, that I'm really not a fan. In fact, sufficiently not a fan that I left a day earlier than I had planned and went to Ottawa on my way to Montreal instead. Nonetheless, i'm not going to skip my time there.

Despite the fact I rather enjoyed being back in Canada, I did, soon enough, get a reminder that Canadians are a strange strange race. I mean, how terrifying is this?!


Don't get me wrong, the moose/mountie combination can work very well ;) but this particular combination is something I would not like to come across in a dark alley, my worst nightmares, or the CN Tower, thank you very much Canada...


Having done the CN tower and wandered down the main street the previous day, I decided to go on a free tour the next day - see if familiarity makes the heart grow fonder where the city is concerned.

I'm not sure that the city grew on me as such, but the tour did an excellent job of bringing a small area of it to life.

We discuss may things. Including the old town hall, which is very pretty, but too small. And the new town hall, which is so like something out of 1960s sci-fi that it has actually been used in episodes of Star Trek:

In a weird concretey way it kind of reminded me of the capitol building in Chicago - both with the whole glass offices looking in thing.

Funnily enough, both of these come ever so close to replicating Benthem's panopticum ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon ). The idea is to have cells (office/cell, same thing really) arranged like this, and a watch tower up the middle, from which the inmates cannot tell whether they're being watched, so they have to reform their behaviour assuming that they are.

Seems like the perfect idea for politicians. And it would be so interesting if we enacted it properly since the orignal idea was to reform the citizens. In this building, the UFO-like dome in the middle is the council chanbers, so it's possible that conceptually all the politicians looking in on this are accountable, i think unfortunately, they need the actual concrete threat...

Still, they do let the people into the lower level of this building too. In fact, they are actively trying to encourage people with exhibitions and art and things. The best of which is pictured below.

From a distance this looks a bit like a big iris, and you can't quite tell what it's made of, it's just very textured-looking. As you go up close, layer upon layer of different lengths of nails are revealed. Apparently the whole thing represents a utopian town planning ideal. Maybe. But the best thing about it is that if you drop pennies in at the top they trickle down the sculpture and make pretty tunes becasue all the nails resonate differently. Simple things.

After that we went via the first free church in Toronto. (There was a point when you had to *pay* to go to church - it's a wonder anyone bothered! Surely even eternal savation has a price!)

This is the oldest church in downtown Toronto. In fact, it's 20 years older than canada itself is!

We wrapped up the tour with an explanation of how the Eaton centre (a pretty hugenormous shopping centre in Toronto) came to be. Which is actually more interesting that it sounds. And also discovered one of the most expensive art installations in Canada.
The piece is a bunch of geese hung from the ceiling that are photo-realistically flying through the centre. Quite cool. The reason they're so expensive is because they got decorated for Christmas one year - some bright spark tied red ribbons around them. At this point the artist sued the Eaton centre for... um... i'm not sure what you'd call it really, misrepresenation? vandelism? Cost them millions. So what have we learned from this? Don't mess with artists... They're probably poor and willing to sue...

In the afternoon, I had arranged to meet up with Natasha, who had been in my residence on the summer schools in Cambridge the previous summer. She was keen to show me around and catch up, which was lovely.

We explored one of the very camdem-eque markets, had a smoothy and wandered around the enourmous university campus. Some of the university buildings are very pretty and it was a lovely afternoon. However, the time came that i had to head back to the hostel and pack for the next move.

That evening I met some lovely people at the hostel and discussed the merits or otherwise of Niagara Falls, which I decided could wait for another time. And them we all chilled out infront of a film and chatted about Toronto in general, which seems to attract a broad range of opinions. I wasn't so keen, but on the other hand, it does have a big cultural and media scene that seems to be lacking out West. Beyond that, i'm not that bothered. Glad I went, not so bothered about leaving.


And so, to Ottawa. A pleasant (practically non-existant, comparatively) 3 hour bus journey later, I arrived into Canada's capital. Once I got into the bus station, I was met by Neil, who I stayed with and who, since we last met in BC, had migrated to Ottawa where he goes to university. (Although, come to think of it, this is a weird direction to migrate towards... but still. A yeti migration perhaps...)

It's really just as well he was there because Ottawa's bus station seems to be in the middle of nowhere - I might have got good and lost on my own (lacking any sensible map-like accessories, yet again).

First on the itinerary - find a Mountie!

Turns out the Canadian parliament didn't feel the need to protect itself from invading British barbarians that day though (very short-sighted of them), and there were no Mounties... Alas. Still, the buildings are quite pretty. Somewhat more rural than their similar British counterparts...

However, neither the buildings nor the politicians are the real stars of parliament hill (Come to think of it, i'm not even sure whether it's called that, but it is a parliament on a hill...)

The real stars are the stray cats...

...which of course, makes perfect sense...

I can't say I managed to see any cats either. In fact, come to think of it I'm starting to wonder whether there was any population at all. And in anycase, they're probably not worth knowing about if they don't include cats *or* Mounties... The area does have a very pretty looking library though. Maybe that's where all the people (and cats?) were...

Anywayz, after all that excitement we wandered into town. The middle of ottawa is kind of cute. The market place reminded me of Bury St Edmonds market... I'm not really sure that this is what the capitol of Canada really ought to be going for, but it's rather nice in any case, just a bit sleepy (or perhaps that's just big-city-itis on my part).

After we'd grabbed some dinner, Neil decided that my life was as yet incomplete, since I had never tried a Beaver Tail.

Fear not. This is pastry, not meaty. (I can only imagine that a real beaver tail might be kind of leathery...). It's like deep fried pastry covered in sugar and other lovely things... I can't even imagine how many calories they contain, but I guess if you're Canadian in the east, you need to build up your store for the winter... The one we had was killaloe sunrise, which if i remember correctly, was sugar and cinnamon and lemon flavour. Very delicious...
After that it was getting a little nippy and we headed back to the suburbs for the evening.


So the next day, somehow we got onto discussing beavers, real beavers, and how excited I would be to see one. And so, The Great Ottawa Beaver Hunt commenced. Well, mainly we went for a walk in a park... but the sentiment was there. We searched up and down the river and through all the four corners of the park. Alas, the beavers had gone in vacanza... we found some dams, but a sad lack of actual beavers. I wonder if perhaps they had been scared away by the millions and millions of geese. There were a *lot* of geese, I'd not have stuck around if i was a beaver, either. Poor beavers.

However, our hunt for wild life was not entirely unsuccessful. We found some terrapins...

.... which was weird. I've never seen terrapins just chilling out a a pond before. Sadly, they were lacking in big whacky tails and fur, and probably teeth too. By which I mean, they weren't beavers... Alas, I guess I'll just have to return to Canada and continue the hunt another time!

And, um, having had a very nice long lie in in the morning, that was more or less all we did in Ottawa before I had to go and get back on a bus... (Not that there's too much more to do there anyways, i don't think). Sad to leave, but happy to have visited, I moved onwards to the strange and wonderful world of French-speaking Canada.