It’s funny how you can live in a city and find it boring without taking the time to learn or appreciate more. Sure, I know that Ottawa is not the world’s most exciting place, and in the winter I feel claustrophobic and desperate to leave. but with springtime, there’s more opportunity to find dozens of the little places that makes a city what it is. In Ottawa, its mostly outside, along paths by the water or in run-down neighborhoods on the edges of downtown. My friend Terris was visiting this weekend, and I was anxious to get out and practice on my new digital camera, which I still really have no idea how to use (I’m still suck in the stone age, otherwise known as “35mm.”) We took the path down through Lebreton Flats, and up along the paths that lead up to parliament.
Lebreton Flats is a desolate place right now – north of Chinatown… and empty. Soon it’s going to be a condo development, but now it’s this vast expanse that sits in front of the war museum and looks out over the Quebec side. I like to walk around there when it’s warm.
I especially like to walk around at this time of year, when everything is mostly brown and dead but the faintest hints of life are starting to show
After making our way along the water, we walked up a path and arrived almost immediately on Parliament Hill (how could I have lived in my neighborhood so long and not realized how easy it was to walk to the parliament buildings?) We heard the chanting from a long way away, but once we arrived on the hill we saw the hundreds of people (mostly Tamils) who were protesting the ongoing crisis in Sri Lanka. The protesters have been filling the city for days. It’s amazing to see.
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