Ottawa part I

Ottawa part I
I spent about four hours wandering Ottawa this am. It's one of the warmest and most humid days of the trip and rain is in the forecast but its sunny this morning. It’s a beautiful city in the midst of a construction boom: roads are being torn up, buildings and bridges fixed, scaffolding everywhere. But, it seems more like a small city than Canada’s capital.
As I wandered, I was reading the itnerpetive signs spread out across the city. One of them explained that Ottawa was established as the capitol in 1857 by Queen Victoria. People were appalled thinking that this out of the way place would be impossible to get to and no one would want to live in this desolate area (kind of like when they established DC as America’s capital, a mosquito infested swamp). And yet, today, Ottawa thrives at its location between three rivers: the Rideau, the Ottawa and the Gatineau. The Rideau canal was built between 1826-1832 to provide a link between Montreal and Kingston (which was the first capital).
Its location also reflects its split heritage between the British to the west and the French to the east. As we moved closer to Ottawa, we saw more and more French on street signs and menus and I imagine as we move further east, we’ll see even more. The town was originally named, By town. I don’t know why but today the area of town called “Bytown Market” is a tourist Mecca (read horrifying display of cheap ethnic food, trinket markets and sidewalk cafes with substandard food). This reincarnation of Bytown seems like a shoddy imitation of once was if an imitation at all. One more of those things cities seem intent on doing to attract tourists—turning perfectly good local neighborhoods into “tourist destinations” (there like strip malls in the city. Hard to tell which city you are in once you find yourself in these tourist areas. Do all tourists want the same thing everywhere they go?).
Like many cities at the turn of the century, Ottawa suffered at least two devastating fires. Today, along the water front are the parliamentary buildings, reconstructed after the fire in the early 1900’s. These buildings remind me of English style structures of the same time period but they are in bad need of a cleaning. There is scaffolding surrounding the buildings, so maybe that’s being done.
You can walk all over the city safely and easily, crossing the bridges that take you to Gatineau and then back into Ottawa, seeing the city from many different angles. The downtown area seems to house a mixture of parliamentary workers and business people and hoardes of tourists and class trips. It’s a lively, energetic center at least in the day time.