Day 11 - Ottawa Day 2

Today we were up and out of the hotel relatively early again; we managed to leave before 10am. First stop was the Ottawa Science and Technology Museum. The museum was very close to our hotel. It is huge! We found it very interesting that they had 3-4 parking spots for expecting mothers.

It seems that the schools in Canada have not stopped for summer vacation yet and that this is their last week. We have been seeing a lot of school groups visiting the sites we have been also visiting for the last couple of weeks. The Science and Technology Museum was not an exception. However, the place is so vast that with at least two big groups in there at the same time we were visiting, the place still looked empty.

It was also one of the few museums that I have visited where almost everything displayed had a "hands-on" experience. And they had a lot show. From canoes to steam locomotives and ships, to space exploration and neutron studies. We spent more than two hours in the museum and we left with the feeling that we missed a few exhibits.

For lunch we went to a fish-and-chips place that Margie found. It happened to be on York Street that resembled a lot a European market street, full of outside merchants and action and the street itself ended at a large number of stairs bringing us back up to the Parliament Hill.

After lunch we decided to leave the car parked where we had it and walk to Sparks Street, a pedestrian street, parallel to Wellington Street that goes right in front of the Parliament buildings. We had lunch on Sparks St. yesterday, but we did not get the chance to visit the Currency Museum of the Bank of Canada, located on the same street. We walked there and spent 30-40 minutes in the museum seeing currencies across time and the globe. Kids seemed to be more interested in the earlier types of currency (shells, stones, furs, etc.) than the current money...

It was almost 4:30pm by the time we were done with the museum and some shopping on Sparks St. Maria fell asleep in my arms on the way to the car. We made it back to the hotel a bit after 5pm. We rested a bit, had dinner and visited the pool one more time. Speaking of dinner, yesterday we stopped at a local grocery store to buy some milk. After $8.88 I walked out of the store with half a gallon of skim milk and half a gallon of 2%. We have it great in the states...