Ottawa: Day one

Its a little cold and snowy here. I was on the 7 am Porter flight and for some reason my ears like exploded on landing, they're still not right.
The course is going well although because I got up at 5 to catch the flight, when they put on a video at 4 pm and shut out the lights I fell instantly asleep.
My course is in the middle of nowhere in Quebec so I got some cute guy in my course to give me a ride back to my hotel. Has Ottawa gone downhill in 17 years or was it always like this? There are LOTS of homeless people here, it reminds me of Atlanta or Chicago. They picked the wrong place, its freezing here.

This is a church, Notre Dame of Basilica or something.
I went first to the National Gallery.

This was like 25 feet long and quite freaky. There was basically not much else there, I thought it would be bigger. They were giving out the Order of Canada or something there so there was about a million people in the lobby. I had heard the Portrait Gallery down the street was closed but they had moved the collection into the National Gallery. Turns out they didn't.
So I left there and started the 7.5 mile walk down to the War Museum. I wish I could figure out these buses. Along the way I passed Parliament:

And the Rideau Canal:

And the Supreme Court of Canada:

Then I went to the War Museum.
The War Museum was amazing and so far the best part of Ottawa. I was looking around for tomorrow night, its a Friday night so of course everything is closed at 5 pm. I guess I'll get up early on Saturday and try to find either/or the Canadian Museum of Nature, Canada Science and Technology Museum, The Currency Museum and the Canadian Museum of Civilization.
Oh yeah, the War Museum. It has a special section on September 11, 2001:

This was a wad of Canadian $100 found at Ground Zero. They then returned it to the Canadian government.
There was also a special section on Tony Blair and his involvement in Iraq which I had already seen in London, I think. Then they had some cool vehicles:


And a recreation of a WW2 bunker.

When you get in there they say you're supposed to prepare for the night which would have TOTALLY sucked. Plus to get in the army you had to have good teeth as they made you eat a sort of dog biscuit thing. They really had it bad. Then lice and cold and smell and the whole getting shot thing.
This is a car Hitler rode in:

I took this exact same picture of this car 17 years ago when I was in Ottawa. It's pretty much all I remember from being here.
I have cable here but it takes me 20 minutes to find a show, and then I usually have to settle for something I wouldn't normally watch. How do people use this anarchic product?