What we didn't realize in our exhausted haze is that Ottawa is actually a very brilliant city, only the train station does not drop you off anywhere near it. It drops you off on the outskirts of town, so the train station is spaced among the corporate parks and neverending highway of a damned sun-stroked nowheresville. And because we are dumb, we decided not to take a bus to get into the city. Having walked so much of the trip already, it just seemed like a reasonable idea to walk until we found downtown Ottawa.
Wouldn't you know it! Ottawa turned out to be a gem. We hadn't made arrangements to find a couchsurfer in Ottawa, so we found the Old Jail Hostel. We asked a man outside of a methadone-clinic where the hostel was, and with unfailing Canadian kindness he walked us all the way over to the street where it was at. The downtown was not very much anything, it was a college park with a few office buildings, that's it. It was similar to Pittsburgh, sans the historic buildings and the Point. Though it did still have a jailhouse. Which is exactly where we were staying!:
Oh, it was just swell. The rooms were old jail-cells and there were brick walls 2 feet thick and giant metal doors you needed TWO keys to enter by. The girl at the front counter was a beautiful chubby cherub who was practicing her Gaelic when we arrived. I asked her what language she was speaking and she said it was Gaelic, not harshly, but the same way she
would answer if i had asked her what color the green walls were or where her computer was and she's sitting right next to it. Then she said, "Why does everyone always think it's so weird i'm studying Gaelic." And i told her it's fascinating she's studying a dying language. "it's not dying," she said. "Oh," i said. So this is jail!She told us about how interesting the Jail Hostel was, that old men would come in from time to time and ask to see a certain cell, then reveal later (as if they had been concealing it for great auspices, they way a magician reveals a hidden trinket) that they were once prisoners in this very jail. I suppose they expected the reaction to be one of amazement, but i think the girls found it creepy. Though, i suppose it does offer a certain mystique, like finding out someone was murdered or conceived in your rented apartment's bedroom. Surprise!
We went walking around Ottawa and found some extremely elaborate fantastic buildings. Parliament is there, as it is Canada's capital. Suddenly the Houston of the North didn't look so bad. It looked more stately than we had first encountered it. There were big green fields in front of Parliament where people were picknicking and families were waiting in line to climb up the clocktower and spit off it, i guess.
The architecture of the city is pretty phenomenal. The art museum was very glassy. Here's what it looks like with a giant spider in front of it:
The cool thing about old cities is they have statues everywhere. And pigeons are always crapping on the statues. And it makes our legends look like douchebags. And if you can look at a legend and think of him as a douchebag, it's a lot like standing in front of a crowd when your supposed to be making a speech and imagining everyone in their underwear. It sort of debases the greatness. So i feel sublime in these historic cities, seeing horsemen and judging by the foothold of the horse if the man died in battle, if he was in battle, or if he was just "noble." But all that is inconsequential to the amount of shit on his head. (there's a very nice photo of one of these ottawa statues on Mark's blog http://train.ography.org)
To give you an impression of the tiredness we were feeling from Montreal and the trains thus far, here is a short clip from our day at the Regal Houston. I believe I am singing James Brown's "This is a Man's World" and Mark is singing James Taylor's "Carolina in my Mind" only in the voice of a dialtone:
To be honest, not much happened in Ottawa. We were pretty dead tired. We ended up eating at an Indian Buffet, though we had no idea how much it cost. We got the buffet and each a beer. The bill came out to $40. Mark flipped his lid. I hadn't seen outrage like that since i was charged $5 for a Budweiser in San Francisco. Five dollars! Five fucking dollars for a Budweiser! What the fuck is that! Anyway, he was less than pleased. The food was decent, but that was pretty exorbitant. We made plans to sabotage the buffet with plastic spiders we didn't have or escape the check by the ol' putting-a-dollar-bill-on-tab routine, but decided that was just plain wrong. So we relished in extravagance instead! Hurrah for psychological melding!
Not wanting to spend any more money, as we had resorted to a hostel and just paid a mad sum to those Indian Buffet pirates, we just walked the Boardwalk for the rest of the evening. Much of this involved my patiently waiting for Mark to take pictures of something in the dark with his shutter opened for several small days in order to allow the image to impress. This process would usually be a good fifteen minutes of waiting around, which i took advantage of by really focusing on some ideas or specific landscapes we were at. That kind of slowing down, rather than booming through sights as most tourists do, allowed me to appreciate a lot of the atmosphere certain locales offered. The highway in Prince Edward Island and the architecture of Chicago and here, the boardwalk along the Rideau River. You don't know the value of quiet spaces because you hear your footsteps, but when you're stopped, you can hear that silence. It's mystifying at times, especially at times of exhaustion. So just to focus on that was a heavy clarity. It allowed the river to do just what it meant to do: pass time.
When we got back to the Hostel, a lot of the inmates were making Thanksgiving dinner as it was Thanksgiving eve and much of there was much merriment to go around. I got tired of telling people the story of what we were doing: Got a rail pass, going across the country, couchsurfing, looking for the Pittsburgh of Canada, bla bla bla. I made the mistake of making up a story about our travels to see if it would be more interesting. I told our cellmate Mark and I were brothers who had inherited a shitload of money from our wealthy, batty old grandfather before he died. His last words were, "I don't know where it is, but you must find it." And so we were on a quest to find "it." The guy lost interest or realized it was a joke or thought i was just psychopathic and predictable before i got to finish the story, explaining to him that the "it" was in us all along. But i guess i would have jumped the gun on that cliche anyway. And who wants that hokey hollywood bullshit on their thanksgiving plate anyway.
After that, i felt alienated from the Hostel crowd, because i had truly made a fool of myself. I kicked myself all night for not making the story more believable. But as we discussed it, Mark assured me that alien sabotage and assassination conspiracies would have supplemented the blase elements of the story just fine.
I might also mention that we had no place to stay in Toronto either. Doting on how lame the night became in Ottawa, we hoped surely that someone would accept our extremely ill-timed Thanksgiving plea for a host. And wouldn't you know it, the holiday spirit came alive. In a message titled "Why Couchsurfing rules":
Hey Jason,
You and your friend are welcome to crash at my place
tomorrow. I have a couch for 1 and a floor for
another. CS rules because you will be coming to my
house on the day of our Thanksgiving party. We will
eat and drink very well tomorrow!
Tony
It was like a blessing. Very definitely the best possible situation. But we'll get to that...
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