October 24, 2006 Archives
Nation's Capital, depending for whom. In French, the Nation's Capital is Quebec City, whereas the place where I am is indeed "La Capitale Federale", but the Nation's Capital.
Ottawa is grey, and grey. I missed my bus stop upon arriving, thinking that the city's central bus station was downtown. It was a kilometer of walk from downtown, maybe 1.5 from Parliament Hill (which I'm going to take a look at in a minute). It was not a very long day, from 9:30 to 4, with long breaks. Our company is attending a trade show here, and my first ever as exhibitor. Lots of flier-folding and folder-assembling during the few days running up to the show, some running around for equipment forgotten (like, the lady at the Rideau Centre Sears says they *always* run out of glass bowls on conference/expo weeks, for some reason XD).
Later on, am supposed to meet up with Felix, who has a passion for public servantship, and has found himself a sweet position in Transports Canada.
I arrived at the bus station at 8:30, but it took only 20-something minutes to walk across downtown up to Centre Rideau, adjacent to the Ottawa Congress Centre. It is such a small city. You notice all sorts of small differences, like the local grocery chains (even if they're probably owned by the same conglomerate), the color and configuration of the circulation lights (yellow, suspended above streets); and the similarities, like the street names (so, Canadian cities only have a limited list of possible Politicians to name streets - and our uptown commercial street within a largely residential area Laurier street becomes Ottawa's main downtown commercial artery - but Metcalfe stays the relatively same north-south downtownish street, whoever this "Metcalfe" dude was).
Probably going to hit the Starbucks afterwards. I've been reading Murakami's short stories collection, which is an easy read. It is as light and fluffy as usual. What I'd like to find is the Yasutaka Tsutsui short stories collection that was recently translated to English (only work of his that was). He was the author of the book that inspired the Kon Satoshi movie Paprika.