| (Excerpted from <a href="http://kiyone.blogspot.com/2005_07_03_kiyone_archive.html#112034550716848702">this entry in my blog</a>.)
After supper, I walked back up Metcalfe to watch the fireworks at Parliament, though I didn't want to be too too close, so I decided to watch them from Metcalfe. The concert was still going on, so I had to sit through several songs by Sam Roberts, or whomever it was on stage. My legs were pooped, and, since there was nowhere to sit, I just had to kneel in the seat. Then some drunk kid comes up to me and asks me if there's a camera hidden in the bag to look up women's skirts or something... actually, I couldn't quite tell what the **** he was muttering about other than "camera" and "bag". Finally, after 10 p.m., the concert ended and the fireworks started. And they were... firework-y. What's there to say, really? They were pretty good as far as fireworks go, but they weren't exponentially all that much better than what I'd have seen at Centennial Park in Beaconsfield some 90 miles to the east. I don't know. I guess I was just expecting what should be the "king of Canadian fireworks displays" for the year, but it was only a little bit better than what a mid-sized suburb can do for pyrotechnics. They did have some neat fireworks that dispersed the sparks in almost a perfect ring. I don't really have any suggestions as to how Ottawa can make the fireworks show even better, I just like being critical. I snapped a couple of dozen pictures of fireworks, but I was largely disappointed with how the pictures look, because I had the camera set to nighttime exposures and kept on getting jostled left and right by people in the crowd, so the photos ended up blurry or trippy. They're interesting, if you view them as "experimental art" photos, as my mother told me to claim, but I can see the value of having a tripod for nighttime photography (not that I would have been able to take photos in the street). I didn't stick around for the entire fireworks show. I left about, by my rough estimates, ten or fifteen minutes early and headed as quickly as I could down the packed Metcalfe Street to the bus stop on Albert, where, very fortunately, an 86 bus was waiting, and, even more amazingly, while it had a larger-than-average number of people for just before 11 p.m. at night, it wasn't remotely as crowded as my sister had warned, so I had no difficulty getting a seat on the bench at the back of the bus (if I can't get an entire two-people seat for myself, I'll sit on a bench seat since I'm shy and random strangers have much less of a tendency to talk to me if I'm sitting on a bench instead of a two-people seat. I wish OC Transpo buses had some of the one-people seats like the Montreal buses have.). |
Crowd on Rideau Street, Canada day. 1280x960 01-Rideau-Street-Ottawa-Canada-Day-2005.JPG Buy Print |
The corner of Wellington and Elgin, at Cenotaph, Ottawa, Canada Day. 1280x960 02-corner-of-Wellington-and-Elgin-Ottawa-Canada-Day-2005.JPG Buy Print |
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1280x960 04-parliament-ottawa-canada-day-2005.JPG Buy Print |
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Parliament through the gates, Ottawa, Canada. 1280x960 06-parliament-through-gates-ottawa-canada-day-2005.JPG Buy Print |
Parliament buildings, Ottawa, Canada. 1280x960 07-parliament-ottawa-canada-day-2005.JPG Buy Print |
The peace tower at Parliament, Ottawa, Canada. 960x1280 08-parliament-ottawa-canada-day-2005.JPG Buy Print |
Parliament, the Peace Tower, and the Canada Day crowds, Ottawa. 1280x960 09-parliament-ottawa-canada-day-2005.JPG Buy Print |
View of downtown Ottawa from Parliament Hill. 1280x960 10-ottawa-canada-day-2005.JPG Buy Print |
Parliament from Metcalfe. 1280x960 11-parliament-seen-from-metcalfe-canada-day-2005.JPG.jpg Buy Print |
Corner of Metcalfe and Sparks Street, Ottawa, Canada. 1280x960 12-corner-metcalfe-and-sparks-street-ottawa-canada-day-2005.JPG.jpg Buy Print |
