babyblog

Back from Ottawa

Which is, I thought, fairly rubbish. It was great to get away for the weekend as a family, but as a venue Ottawa left alot to be desired. Take any large town / city in Southern Ontario and you have Ottawa, plus it has a few buildings designed to look like the British Houses of Parliament which don't quite work and are not particularly interesting to look at, architectually speaking. From a British perspective not interesting really at all, no history, no sense of world power. A few museums and galleries designed to attract the tourists house some not very interesting exhibits, and otherwise you have the same old shops, same looking streets, same old same old (except it's a bit colder there).

I suppose we're spoiled really - growing up in one of the best cultural and historical cities in the world. And many places I've had the pleasure of visiting have so much to offer. London, New York, Paris, Rome, Boston, even some of the not-so-historical cities in the West of the US have their own charm and individuality which makes them worth visiting. When I think of the wonders housed in some of the museums in London, from Old Masters to Egyptian Mummies to full sized Dinosaur skeletons.....all manner of the worlds best examples of art and history...... I find it hard to get excited over some Canadian artist nobody outside of Ontario has ever heard of (and probably with good reason). Ottawa museums really didn't seem to offer anything worth paying the entrance fee for.

All in all, I'd say Toronto is a *much* better city.

We stayed in a nice hotel, except for the fact that the fire alarm went off at 3am last night and we got evacuated (!). D loved the fact there was a pool and went swimming 3 times. We ate well. The highlight of the weekend for me was driving over into Quebec, away from the somewhat oppresive eastern-european regime same-ness of Ontario, into the hills, gorgeous scenery, and stopping at a lovely old village for lunch in a cafe serving absolutely delicious food.

One of the surprising things for me this weekend was not being able to walk the streets for 10 hours due to my pregnant belly! We generally like to explore on foot when we go anywhere, and we set off (over-ambitiously) on Saturday morning to walk around Ottawa. It didn't help that it was bloody cold, but after an hour or so I was really needing to sit & feeling the strain.

This morning, resting in the room while G & D went for a final swim, I felt the baby kick from the outside for the first time. I was resting my hand under my tummy lying on my side and felt a definite kick. So nice!

Still feeling really overawed by knowing we're having another boy. I think alot of it is the difference between knowing and not knowing (regardless of the sex).... it's a whole new ballgame and I didn't have that experience with D. Before finding out - there's a baby in there, could be male, could be female, and basically I didn't think of him as a person anything like as much as I now do, now that I know. The bond is so much stronger for knowing. It's weird, I never thought I'd feel that way! I also think I might've pursuaded G into one of my favourite names, fingers crossed!

Posted by katie at March 14, 2004 07:45 PM