Day Ottawa the Second, Trip Three
Aside: I’m currently eating a very good donair. They are the messiest food on the face of the planet, and I’m sure my keyboard is going to smell like garlic for years. Also, I am surprisingly good at typing with one hand. Back to the library.
If you want to know what it lokos like, picture that scene in Beauty and the Beast, where the Beast throws open the curtains to reveal walls full of books, with ladders and the whole bit. Now take away the ladders, add some discreet staircases and some trippy glass floors, and the ceiling from the ballroom scene in BatB. The computer-generated one. And make the room circular. And maybe a touch musty. So Good. And then add our little cute jokey tour guide running up to some old guy with a zoom lens because, despite the fact that she told us on at least three separate occasions, several times on each occasion, that we were NOT allowed to take pictures in the library, this dude thought he just could anyway. That, along with the Incident in the Senate with the Grumbly Man who Didn’t Take Off His Hat, formed the grand total of the mystery-and-intrigue of the tour.
Except! Ooh…after the tour was over, I went up to the top of the Peace Tower (highly recommended - you can see the whole carollion of bells through a window in the elevator on the way up), and then down to the Memorial Hall (always makes me want to cry) where they have big books full of the names of soldiers who have died in wars for Canada, I wandered back outside to sit in the sun and kind of …watch things. That morning, you see, over to the left of the main entrance to the buildings, where the MPs at least sometimes enter, leave, and have press conferences, there had been a crowd of people in suits, and a corresponding crowd of people in clothing so informal they could only have been media. Alright, the boom mikes were good tip-offs too. Anyway, some of them were still around when I came out of the tour, and after a few minutes of observation (and one guy yelling across the driveway that they were going to do a rehearsal as soon as the two briefcases were in position - the briefcases were, in fact, people) it became clear that these people were not waiting for Michael Ignatieff’s latest rejoinder to Stephen Harper’s latest rebuke against Michael Ignatieff’s previous gauntlet-throwing. They were shooting a movie. Or at least a cheapie Canadian TV show. /Then/ I noticed that the strange guy in the suit under the umbrella (it was about 26 degrees outside today) standing behind me with a few other people was not just some strange guy in a suit, he was that bitchy guy from Sue Thomas F. B. Eye! Please tell me I’m not the only one for whom that show was a total guilty pleasure. The one, not the Australian one, and not the boss, but the one with the inimitable ego, and floppy blondish hair?
Anyway, this guy was standing, like, twenty feet behind me, with the camera crew about a hundred feet behind him, and spoke into a cell phone with a boom mike three inches above his head (yes, the umbrella was gone) and some chick in a polka dot skirt feeding him the lines he was responding to from a foot away, and then two hundred feet behind all of this, about six carefully-coordinated suits walked in pairs in predetermined directions. One of them, from where I was sitting, could have been Michael Shanks. But then I moved, and that ceased to be a possibility.
Okay, enough with the pathetic star-watching. Pathetic-star watching? No, that’s mean.
Next I made my way to the Museum of Civilization. Because. On the way to the Parliament buildings in the morning, I passed a sign advertising the current temporary exhibit that the MC was putting on. Mythical Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns and Mermaids. Uh, hello? How could I not go. So I did. Went through the Pacific Peoples hall first, although to my chagrin it felt more like civic duty than real interest. This could be because of my previously-mentioned Museum of Manitoba excursion.
Anyway, then, going a little backwards, I went to a temporary exhibit about royalty and stamps, which was actually a lot more fascinating than in sounds. It was all about how postage stamps were invented, kind of out of necessity, and then how the first ones were designed, and distributed, and how rampant stamp-forgery was, so the first stamps, Penny Blacks and Twopence Blues, each with a profile of Queen Victoria on them, cancelled with red ink, had to be changed into Penny Reds and, well, Twopenny (slightly different ink composition) Blues, cancelled with black ink, so that they couldn’t just be washed and reused, basically. And how a Postmaster in New Brunswick issued new stamps in Canadian currency instead of British, clearly ahead of his time, but he put his own portrait on them instead of an actual royal, and lost his job over it? Cool stuff.
But yes. The Mythical Creatures (not Prince William). Very sadly, this was another one of those places where you weren’t supposed to take photos. Here, though, as opposed to at the library, I decided I didn’t care. Until my battery started dying, and I had to stop. But I think I got one of the big dragon statue, and a couple of a really cool wire sculpture of a Pegasus, and one of a fake mermaid fossil plate that a paleontologist made out of fiberglass after he got sick of being retired. I would’ve gotten one of the unicorn, too, except the security guard was making ridiculously fast laps of the exhibit, and there was at least one other guest who took it upon himself to hiss angrily at a poor Chinese couple taking photos who, it is entirely possible, did not in fact read the sign.
The exhibit was mostly a cultural-context thing, taking mythical creatures of the land, air and sea, and examining how they travel and overlap between cultures, and how their meanings, and even the usage of their stories, changes over time. For Example, did you know that a very very long time ago in Greece & surrounding area there used to be a kind of smallish elephant with a hole in its skull where its trunk attached, right in the middle of it’s ‘forehead?’ And that the rest of it’s skeleton, to a non-biologist, looks pretty darn close to a human skeleton, especially when it comes to the ‘long bones’ of the limbs? The theory is, and I can totally see this happening, because they had one of the elephant skulls there, and it was uncanny, that ancient Greeks found these bones, either fossilized or not, I wasn’t clear, and attributed them to giants with only one eye, right in the middle of their foreheads, that had been killed by gods or heroes. Now is that cool, or what?? Cyclopes were real, they just… didn’t… resemble… humans… at all. But shhh… It was around the time that I wandered out of the temporary exhibit and right into the gift shop that I realized that that had been the exact room where the bog people exhibit had been six years ago. I left the gift shop.
Anyway, I finished off with the Hall of Canada, which actually took me probably as long to get through as the rest of the museum put together (I skipped the fourth floor and the Children’s Museum. Sometimes you can only do so much.). It was, or tried to be, jointly chronological and geographic in its organization, and more or less succeeded. This is made easier by the fact that it was really only dealing with the European influx, having already dealt with the pre-existing culture on the first floor, and that the European influx proceeded more or less directly Eastward. The thing that sets the MC off from others, though, is that it absolutely commits to every time period it depicts. It may not have an entire sailing ship, but it has a chunk of one, with a diorama inside of a dying sailor, and a soundtrack of the poor man’s Final Will and Testament (probably an actual document they found somewhere), and timbers creaking and waves crashing. And then you turn a corner and you’re inside an early-Acadian shoemaker’s stall. Niche? Sure. Interesting? Absolutely.
The sections on Alberta and Saskatchewan are, sadly, limited to a grain elevator-thingy for the latter and a bit of an oil rig for the former, which were cool - I don’t think I’d ever really thought about how a grain elevator worked before - but kind of one sided. Ontario and Quebec have more history in a timeline sense, but to reduce Alberta to roughnecks and some American who messed around with nitroglycerin a lot is a bit narrow. Then again, the most modern part of the whole Hall is the very last room, which is dedicated to the Vancouver International Airport. Not kidding. It has a replica of a 1960’s waiting room and everything. I suppose it’s meant to close the circle - Western influence to Eastern influence, European invasion to Filipino and Japanese immigrants - but I find it odd that modernity doesn’t really play any part in the exhibit. Maybe I would have found more modern personalities on the fourth floor - the Face to Face exhibit, an in-depth look at some of the most influential famous and not-famous people in Canada’s history - but then again, maybe I wouldn’t.
At this point I was completely museum-ed out and my back was hurting from peering at exhibits all day, so I walked back. Unfortunately, I chose the long way, which gave me some good canal views on the pathway, but took me about half an hour. And yeah. Picked up the donair, came back. Wrote. I may go for a nap next, but it’s only 6:30, and it’s not like I’ll get up and go dancing tonight, so maybe I’ll grab a book from the sharing library in the lounge and suck it up. Talk to you tomorrow from La Belle Province!
If you want to know what it lokos like, picture that scene in Beauty and the Beast, where the Beast throws open the curtains to reveal walls full of books, with ladders and the whole bit. Now take away the ladders, add some discreet staircases and some trippy glass floors, and the ceiling from the ballroom scene in BatB. The computer-generated one. And make the room circular. And maybe a touch musty. So Good. And then add our little cute jokey tour guide running up to some old guy with a zoom lens because, despite the fact that she told us on at least three separate occasions, several times on each occasion, that we were NOT allowed to take pictures in the library, this dude thought he just could anyway. That, along with the Incident in the Senate with the Grumbly Man who Didn’t Take Off His Hat, formed the grand total of the mystery-and-intrigue of the tour.
Except! Ooh…after the tour was over, I went up to the top of the Peace Tower (highly recommended - you can see the whole carollion of bells through a window in the elevator on the way up), and then down to the Memorial Hall (always makes me want to cry) where they have big books full of the names of soldiers who have died in wars for Canada, I wandered back outside to sit in the sun and kind of …watch things. That morning, you see, over to the left of the main entrance to the buildings, where the MPs at least sometimes enter, leave, and have press conferences, there had been a crowd of people in suits, and a corresponding crowd of people in clothing so informal they could only have been media. Alright, the boom mikes were good tip-offs too. Anyway, some of them were still around when I came out of the tour, and after a few minutes of observation (and one guy yelling across the driveway that they were going to do a rehearsal as soon as the two briefcases were in position - the briefcases were, in fact, people) it became clear that these people were not waiting for Michael Ignatieff’s latest rejoinder to Stephen Harper’s latest rebuke against Michael Ignatieff’s previous gauntlet-throwing. They were shooting a movie. Or at least a cheapie Canadian TV show. /Then/ I noticed that the strange guy in the suit under the umbrella (it was about 26 degrees outside today) standing behind me with a few other people was not just some strange guy in a suit, he was that bitchy guy from Sue Thomas F. B. Eye! Please tell me I’m not the only one for whom that show was a total guilty pleasure. The one, not the Australian one, and not the boss, but the one with the inimitable ego, and floppy blondish hair?
Anyway, this guy was standing, like, twenty feet behind me, with the camera crew about a hundred feet behind him, and spoke into a cell phone with a boom mike three inches above his head (yes, the umbrella was gone) and some chick in a polka dot skirt feeding him the lines he was responding to from a foot away, and then two hundred feet behind all of this, about six carefully-coordinated suits walked in pairs in predetermined directions. One of them, from where I was sitting, could have been Michael Shanks. But then I moved, and that ceased to be a possibility.
Okay, enough with the pathetic star-watching. Pathetic-star watching? No, that’s mean.
Next I made my way to the Museum of Civilization. Because. On the way to the Parliament buildings in the morning, I passed a sign advertising the current temporary exhibit that the MC was putting on. Mythical Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns and Mermaids. Uh, hello? How could I not go. So I did. Went through the Pacific Peoples hall first, although to my chagrin it felt more like civic duty than real interest. This could be because of my previously-mentioned Museum of Manitoba excursion.
Anyway, then, going a little backwards, I went to a temporary exhibit about royalty and stamps, which was actually a lot more fascinating than in sounds. It was all about how postage stamps were invented, kind of out of necessity, and then how the first ones were designed, and distributed, and how rampant stamp-forgery was, so the first stamps, Penny Blacks and Twopence Blues, each with a profile of Queen Victoria on them, cancelled with red ink, had to be changed into Penny Reds and, well, Twopenny (slightly different ink composition) Blues, cancelled with black ink, so that they couldn’t just be washed and reused, basically. And how a Postmaster in New Brunswick issued new stamps in Canadian currency instead of British, clearly ahead of his time, but he put his own portrait on them instead of an actual royal, and lost his job over it? Cool stuff.
But yes. The Mythical Creatures (not Prince William). Very sadly, this was another one of those places where you weren’t supposed to take photos. Here, though, as opposed to at the library, I decided I didn’t care. Until my battery started dying, and I had to stop. But I think I got one of the big dragon statue, and a couple of a really cool wire sculpture of a Pegasus, and one of a fake mermaid fossil plate that a paleontologist made out of fiberglass after he got sick of being retired. I would’ve gotten one of the unicorn, too, except the security guard was making ridiculously fast laps of the exhibit, and there was at least one other guest who took it upon himself to hiss angrily at a poor Chinese couple taking photos who, it is entirely possible, did not in fact read the sign.
The exhibit was mostly a cultural-context thing, taking mythical creatures of the land, air and sea, and examining how they travel and overlap between cultures, and how their meanings, and even the usage of their stories, changes over time. For Example, did you know that a very very long time ago in Greece & surrounding area there used to be a kind of smallish elephant with a hole in its skull where its trunk attached, right in the middle of it’s ‘forehead?’ And that the rest of it’s skeleton, to a non-biologist, looks pretty darn close to a human skeleton, especially when it comes to the ‘long bones’ of the limbs? The theory is, and I can totally see this happening, because they had one of the elephant skulls there, and it was uncanny, that ancient Greeks found these bones, either fossilized or not, I wasn’t clear, and attributed them to giants with only one eye, right in the middle of their foreheads, that had been killed by gods or heroes. Now is that cool, or what?? Cyclopes were real, they just… didn’t… resemble… humans… at all. But shhh… It was around the time that I wandered out of the temporary exhibit and right into the gift shop that I realized that that had been the exact room where the bog people exhibit had been six years ago. I left the gift shop.
Anyway, I finished off with the Hall of Canada, which actually took me probably as long to get through as the rest of the museum put together (I skipped the fourth floor and the Children’s Museum. Sometimes you can only do so much.). It was, or tried to be, jointly chronological and geographic in its organization, and more or less succeeded. This is made easier by the fact that it was really only dealing with the European influx, having already dealt with the pre-existing culture on the first floor, and that the European influx proceeded more or less directly Eastward. The thing that sets the MC off from others, though, is that it absolutely commits to every time period it depicts. It may not have an entire sailing ship, but it has a chunk of one, with a diorama inside of a dying sailor, and a soundtrack of the poor man’s Final Will and Testament (probably an actual document they found somewhere), and timbers creaking and waves crashing. And then you turn a corner and you’re inside an early-Acadian shoemaker’s stall. Niche? Sure. Interesting? Absolutely.
The sections on Alberta and Saskatchewan are, sadly, limited to a grain elevator-thingy for the latter and a bit of an oil rig for the former, which were cool - I don’t think I’d ever really thought about how a grain elevator worked before - but kind of one sided. Ontario and Quebec have more history in a timeline sense, but to reduce Alberta to roughnecks and some American who messed around with nitroglycerin a lot is a bit narrow. Then again, the most modern part of the whole Hall is the very last room, which is dedicated to the Vancouver International Airport. Not kidding. It has a replica of a 1960’s waiting room and everything. I suppose it’s meant to close the circle - Western influence to Eastern influence, European invasion to Filipino and Japanese immigrants - but I find it odd that modernity doesn’t really play any part in the exhibit. Maybe I would have found more modern personalities on the fourth floor - the Face to Face exhibit, an in-depth look at some of the most influential famous and not-famous people in Canada’s history - but then again, maybe I wouldn’t.
At this point I was completely museum-ed out and my back was hurting from peering at exhibits all day, so I walked back. Unfortunately, I chose the long way, which gave me some good canal views on the pathway, but took me about half an hour. And yeah. Picked up the donair, came back. Wrote. I may go for a nap next, but it’s only 6:30, and it’s not like I’ll get up and go dancing tonight, so maybe I’ll grab a book from the sharing library in the lounge and suck it up. Talk to you tomorrow from La Belle Province!