Ottawa

It's been a few days since my last proper update. This has been partially due to cranky internet access and partly due to being on the road for much of the time. As y'all remember I had a somewhat diffcult time crossing into Canada. Toronto traffic was hellish but I finally reached Ottawa in one piece.

Ottawa is a nice city, one that I will definitely come back to when I do my trip from coast to coast in Canada, sometime in the hopefully not too distant future. As a capital city it houses Parliament and a hole host of other important and interesting buildings, and it has some very nice parks, canals and architecture, none of which I managed to take photos of. Yes, I'm an eejit.

On July 1, Canada Day, I hooked up with a longtime friend who I'd never met before. Yeah, she's an old chathouse pal that I've been trading insults with on msn and later facebook for many years. She's always been on my case about coming to Canada and Ottawa was the place to be on Canada Day and yadda, yadda, yadda. So finally I obliged.

We drove around downtown, through a labyrinth of closed streets, so I got a somewhat abbreviated guided tour. Still, more than enough to make me want to explore more. The next day I was invited over to her house, where her mom she was cooking up a storm. Two friends of the family and three foreign exchange students were also there and we all stuffed face on BBQ and assorted goodies and had a good ole time around the table. Canucks are a hospitable people, much like the yanks (but oh, how they hate being compared to their southern cousins) and I look forward to seeing them again... minus the retarded border control, that is.