April 21, 2012

Ottawa: Still Cold

Returning to Ottawa after 22 years, Keith was quickly reminded of a certain kind of March that we just don't have in Vancouver.


However, it also has buildings like no-where else out west. The blowing snow and the stubborn, dramatic structures, like rock formations crystallizing out of the cold ground, were beautiful in a way that they never had been to a busy student.


Byward Market doesn't really compare to Granville Island, but that's just not being fair.


It did offer up a delicious Atlantic salmon pie for lunch.



Bourgeois' Mother spider at the National Gallery.


Roxy Paine's 100 Foot Line looked like a crack in the flat grey sky.


Just outside the front door, the National Gallery has an unintentional piece of light sculpture on their hands. Perhaps we can get a grant to name it and point it out to them, since it's already installed.


Sushi Go has great interiors and logo design. The ramen was okay.


With one word this became our favourite café. We're suckers for Futura anyway.


Aya grabbing $750,000 at the Canadian Mint.


On a completely unrelated note, we went directly to prison after that.


These are the cells converted to dorm rooms in the Ottawa Jail Youth Hostel. (We had a nicer room upstairs).


Chicken breasts from the market, one stuffed with Camembert and cranberries and the other with mushrooms and shallot butter. We cooked them up in the hostel kitchen.
A cold bottle of the ever-reliable Friexenet Cava, with its fine bubbles and citrus-mineral flavour was the perfect match. Prison food is not what it used to be.


The evening train to Montreal, another city full of beautiful buildings and amazing food.

We really did not expect to have quite so many posts about trains.

3 comments:

  1. thoroughly enjoyable! I loved it all; the light sculpture you identified is a famous Christmas tree representation - isn't it? And that long pole - cracking the sky has an antecedent in the wonderful sculpture, by the ahead-of-his-time artist Len Lye - about 34 metres high, installed with a red lolly on top on the boardwalk of New Plymouth, NZ town - long after he left. Both great!

    Your meals look delicious and brought me thoughts of tonight's dinner. Aya you look adorable as ever! Thanks for these lovely things you send me, the jail bit was huge fun, I now have no fear of it. And those beautiful icicles - was that what I was looking at? I haven't seen those lately either.

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