Ottawa Tulip Festival

May saw us head of to Canadas Capital - Ottawa about 4 hours drive north east of us, for the Tulip Festival and to experience more of Canada.

We had a wonderful weekend here, this is a beautiful old city with lots of magnificent buildings and a very European influence. We had lunch at a restaurant at the end of the Rideau Canal to begin with, this canal is man made and is the longest skating rink in the world in winter. There were tulips all along the canal, these come up after winter and were everywhere and in every colour. We then were invited along with the other exchange teachers to have afternoon tea at the Australian Embassy and meet the Aust Ambassador to Canada, quite young man very personable. Then we had a BBQ at one of the Canadians house in Quebec, all French. Ottawa is in Ontario divided by the Rideau river and on the other side of the river is Quebec so all French, very interesting.

Next day we went for a tour of the Parliament buildings very old and English, they are very pro monachy here much stronger than Aust. Anyway it was lovely and quite huge. We then had a native experience and saw TeePees and had a native lunch, which was also quite an eye opener.

We then went to the museum of Civilisation the next day and this was really amazing reading about the development of another country is really interesting and its so different to Aust and the fact we knew very little about any of it made it very worthwhile.