Category: Ottawa

Posts about Canada’s capital city, and the experience of living there

One virtue of small cities

One nice thing about Ottawa is that – as long as you avoid homes in distant suburbs or jobs in distant industrial parks – commutes are manageable. As long as you live and work in the general area of Centretown, walking to work will probably take less than half an hour.

That isn’t true of larger and more interesting places like Vancouver or Toronto. It’s a significant consideration, given that commuting time is basically dead time that gets wasted five days a week. It may be possible to make some use of the time, like by listening to podcasts or trying to read, but there is certainly a frequent sacrifice of sleep or interesting activities that accompanies any lengthy commute.

VERSeFest 2011

I went to a slam poetry event at Ottawa’s VERSeFest tonight, and it was extremely good. The speakers were very talented, and the crowd was duly appreciative.

For the most part, the poets were very critical of government policy and society in general. I suppose that is normal at these events, which have a certain idealistic revolutionary flavour. At the end, I wished I had a chance to respond to some of the speakers and say that, for the most part, problems persist because they are difficult to solve, not because people are malevolent. More often, they are just focused on other priorities, or blocked by structural constraints and the inherent difficulty of solving enduring problems. All that said, a lack of compassion is definitely one reason why problems like homelessness endure, and poetry is a medium that seems capable of encouraging greater compassion.

This is the first time this particular festival is being held, and it seems to involve a tonne of different events. Tomorrow (Saturday, March 13th) is the last day, with a bilingual poetry event at 1:30pm, Japanese form poetry at 3:00pm, a Dusty Owl Reading Series event at 5:00pm, and a closing ceremony at 7:00pm.

Passes for the day are $10, and available at Arts Court (2 Daly Avenue), The Manx (370 Elgin Street), and Collected Works (1242 Wellington Street).

I have about eight gigabytes of RAW image files from the event to process, but I will definitely put up a link to the Flickr set once I have dealt with them.

Photographing a hospital

On Tuesday, I was in the Ottawa Hospital for what turned out to be the final x-ray for my broken clavicle (there comes a point when checking on progress isn’t worth the time and radiation exposure). I brought along my camera to photograph the x-ray on screen. While I was going from station to station with paperwork, it occurred to me that photographing a hospital with official permission would be fascinating and would have artistic and historical importance.

People assume that there is no need to document how things are now, since they will always basically be this way. But that simply isn’t true. Photos of hospitals from the 1950s are interesting today, and they have historical importance. They show how we treated people who were injured, sick, or dying at that point in time – which is an important reflection on a society or civilization as a whole.

If you had official permission, you could get amazing access. Of course, you would also need to get releases from any patients, visitors, and staff you photographed. In the end, though, you would have some solid information on the state of Ontario’s medical system at this juncture in time.

I don’t have time for such a project at the moment, but it is something for my ‘someday/maybe’ to do list.

Mini-review: Cheap Eats Ottawa

While blogs like Apt 613 are a great way to get information on Ottawa happenings, there is a case to be made for going out and buying a book once in a while. That is particularly true when it comes to a well-researched, informative, and up-to-date offering like Cheap Eats Ottawa. For anyone who feels like this town is a bit small, this book is a way of discovering some of the places between the places you’ve already visited a million times. There are options for just about every part of town and just about every cuisine, and useful lists like places that are open exceptionally late and places that are good for dates.

Cheap Eats Ottawa is on sale at Perfect Books (258A Elgin Street). The authors also run a blog.

Mini-review: Pelikan Pelikano

If you like fountain pens, or are curious about them, consider picking up Pelikan’s inexpensive pen designed for European schoolchildren. It costs less than $30 and has a good writing and ink delivery mechanism. It is very bright and simple in its design (they come in primary colours), but there is nothing wrong with that. A lot of fountain pens are designed for people who want to pretend they are General Douglas MacArthur signing a peace treaty aboard a battleship. If you just want something that is fun to write with and a little bit unusual in this age of ubiquitous ballpoint and gel pens, this simple and inexpensive offering is one to consider.

Ottawans can find these pens on sale at Wallack’s (231 Bank Street).

(Note: Make sure to use these pens with cartridges or converters appropriately shaped for Pelikan pens. Cramming in the more commonly available refills available for other brands can lead to inconsistent ink flow and the risk of pen-splosions.)