Canada Day in Ottawa

 Canada Day got off to a slow start for me, I didn't make it downtown until 3pm. However, I don't think I missed out by getting going so late.

I spent my afternoon wandering around downtown among the crowds that were just about everywhere in downtown. Way more than back in Victoria. Victoria seems way too laid back to have a good afternoon Canada Day celebration. Here, it's a bigger deal and not just because Will & Kate are in town. The less you venture out, the more you miss out on. My wanderings later in the day proved that when I found all kinds of other stuff going on in the different areas of downtown.

But first, I started on Sparks St., which is kind of like Bastion Square meets Las Ramblas (or Stephen Ave. in Calgary). It's several blocks long and has all kinds of festivals and entertainment. When I arrived in the city, Ribfest was going on down there and all kinds of booths were set up to get people to try their award-winning ribs and perhaps win awards again this year.

I watched one of the buskers who was in the middle of one of the streets which was mostly blocked off for the crowds. I say 'mostly' because there was a point where the crowd had to part to let an ice truck through while the busker directed the truck with his bowling pins in hand. I started watching towards the end of his show, where he kept trying to work his way up to the grand finale where he would ride the "Mini Clown Bike of Doom" (dun dun dun...) and then jump up on two guys to make a human pyramid and juggle flaming batons. He first had one of the big guys try out the bike to show how difficult it was and then a kid who was a bit more the bike's size. During the show, he also dissed Ottawa U, which I wasn't sure was warranted or not since I have no idea about that school despite wandering around its halls on my first day here, but the crowd booed. He was saying that what he was doing is what you can do with a degree from Ottawa U, but later explained at the end of the show that he was a theatre major at the University and that busking is literally what he is qualified to do. What I saw of his show was quite good, and the kid who helped out with demonstrating the Mini Clown Bike of Doom and the spinning plate was given five dollars for his trouble instead of his other choice of animal balloon.

Brothers Dubé playing on Sparks St.

I then wandered a bit further down Sparks and found these guys, The Brothers Dubé. Kids playing some serious rock and roll and being quite professional too. The red-head who was singing and MC-ing is only 12 years old! The other two boys are his older and younger brothers, the drummer Quinn (10) and guitarist Liam (14). I was very impressed. They played very rocky Beatles covers and Guns'N Roses and Metallica, but also their own songs. They even have an album coming out, which I think is incredible. They also seem to have their whole family involved; the dad does their sound setup and the grandfather was handing out band cards.

I filmed a small chunk of their cover of Come Together with my camera:

kids swimming in the fountain in Confederation Par

I did a bit more wandering around after that and checked out what was happening at Jazz Fest, which was free only for Canada Day and found a spot after a while to sit and cool my feet off in the fountain in Confederation Park like everyone else. I was trying to get in touch with Julianne at this point to figure out when and where I'd be meeting up with her and everyone else. While I waited, I was watching the kids swimming around in the footbath of a fountain. Shortly after I sat down, there was a little girl with her dad and baby sister who sat next to me and stuck her feet in the fountain too. Her little sister took the Canadian flag someone else had left behind and was poking my purse with it. The dad tried to tell her not to take things from other people, but since it wasn't mine I told him she could keep it. The little girl next to me saw some change on the bottom of the fountain and wanted to throw a penny in herself. She asked her dad for one, but he didn't have anything on him and told her to wait for her mom to return. I've had loads of pennies floating around lately, so I told her I could give her one. The dad told her to make sure it was a really good wish because she had taken mine. I didn't want to wish in the dirty fountain, just work on a sketch of it; that sketch was short-lived because I heard back from Julianne and left.

She told me to bring booze with me for drinking before we headed out, but the liquor stores are not open on Canada Day, even in the mall and I hadn't planned ahead because liquor is expensive (and I have no job) and I don't really care whether I drink or not right now. I lost touch with Julianne and had to find something to do in the meantime until I could find out where I was headed to meet her and Sean.
   
I ended up wandering around further down on Rideau and in the Byward Market. Back-to-back stages seem to work surprisingly well. On one block (and from blocks away) you could hear the pumping techno music of Tiesto coming from the Escapade Music Festival. I walked around the block and there was another stage with a rock band playing, and you could not tell that Tiesto was blaring away on the opposite side. No idea who the band was though.

I decided after that to head back up towards Parliament because it was getting closer to the time I thought Will & Kate were making their second appearance of the day. It was not essential to see them, but because Julianne had been silent for so long and I wanted to check out something different, I figured why not. I wasn't there long and the concert series was set to start soon and I started getting text messages from way too many people at once, one of whom was a random wrong number. I asked who it was and got the response "fancy man". Okay... interesting. However, when he figured out I wasn't his friend Luc, I didn't hear back. But in the meantime I did hear back from Julianne and started to walk towards where they were down on King Edward at the other end of downtown. By the time I reached the location of their last update, they had continued on and I missed them. While waiting trying to figure out in which direction to go, a car drove by with a girl getting sick out of the window. Attractive.

I finally found Julianne and Sean and they had met up with Amanda as well. Julien, with a couple of his friends in tow, joined us shortly. I had no idea what the plan was, but we headed over to Julien's for dinner. Grilled hot dogs and hamburgers, normally uninteresting but Jason was manning the grill and he is a chef, so we were treated to a gourmet BBQed dinner. A few of us had some tea (really good Darjeeling, from the first flush) and Sean ate his slightly iffy hot dogs that had been perhaps sitting around for too long before getting cooked. The burgers were safe to eat, and so delicious, with both the tomatoes and buns being grilled as well. We got treated to watermelon and grapes by Julien's mom for dessert.

We left to go watch the fireworks, expecting the location Julien had suggested to be nearly empty. It wasn't. We found a different spot in the same park with less people and set down the sheet Sean brought with him. The fireworks started and we discovered we'd made a slight miscalculation in our location because there was a tree blocking the view of half of the fireworks. We all moved over about ten feet and stood instead during the display. Much better than Victoria, yet still not beyond spectacular. But it was enjoyable.

Just after the fireworks finished some guy started walking toward us in the dark and started yelling. Apparently one of their friends. Bram became quite the entertaining fellow for the rest of the night. We met up with Fraser (who I met on my first night out on the town in Ottawa) and were planning on heading downtown to meet up with another group of people. We had to return to Julien's before leaving though to retrieve some stuff which turned into the guys goofing off in the garage with all the weight training equipment... and an air gun. Jason, our lovely chef, was very nervous about the gun, just as he had been about people setting off fireworks in the park; he literally ran when someone set one off about ten feet away from us as we were walking to find a good spot.

We finally got going and I learned first-hand why I was told before leaving Victoria not to live in Vanier. We hit that area and there were sketchy drug-addled people hanging about on the corners. And we ended up stopping at one of those corners for a good 5-10 minutes because they ran into someone a bunch of them knew from years ago and decided to get caught up. As we walked through that area I was extremely glad that the ratio of guys to girls was about 2:1; it made me feel much safer.

We arrived downtown and met up with their friends, who were very drunk, as young people on Canada Day tend to be. I really was the anomaly last night. Shortly after meeting up with their friends John and Luke, Bram decided to take his pants off. I can't remember the lead up to why this happened. Later Bram and Julien came up with the idea that because women like tall men that if they were twice as tall, they'd have even better luck with the ladies. Julien is not that tall, so we're not sure where they got the idea of 14 feet being the correct number of their combined height. I tried to take a photo of Julien sitting on Bram's shoulders while they approached girls saying they were conjoined twins and trying to proposition them, but my camera tends to be uncooperative at night. I had a bottle of iced tea with me from earlier and at one point Bram asked me if it was just a bottle full of alcohol. No. I think it was around this time that he asked me if I thought they were a bunch of assholes. I said no, and he responded that he wasn't doing a good enough job then. I told him I found him entertaining. People who randomly take off their pants downtown when there are cops and clean-up crews everywhere are certainly entertaining. He came up to me again later and said "You seem like you're a lot less drunk than me". Why yes, I haven't had a thing to drink all day. Too funny.

I was feeling a bit nervous about when my bus stopped running and bailed after about an hour downtown just chilling out. They were trying to figure out where to go next, but couldn't come to a consensus, so it seemed like a good time to go. I didn't get home until 1:30am anyways, so it's not like it was that early of a night; but I made the right decision in joining Julianne and everyone if I wanted to have a good time on Canada Day because my roommates were all in bed when I got home.