The Force Was With Us

Okay, I know I’m a geek.  Worse, a geek of a particular generation and type.  But today we went to the Star Wars exhibit at the aviation museum and it was the coolest thing ever!  The show was actually very educational, taking about how things shape who we are – culture, parenting etc. all through examining the characters of the story.  It was very high tech with electronic devices telling us stuff, but these wicked cool bracelets that were interactive so at various stations you had to choose characteristics (are you a human or a wookie?  Where do you live?  Who is your mentor Vader or Obi wan… )   

If you’re all very nice, we’ll send you the link to see the character that was our end result.  But you have to be very nice.

Frightening isn't it?

Anyway, it was soo cool – we got to see costumes and original drawings and the puppets and the models.  Clearly, I was very excited.  Mike was happy to see me so happy. (Clearly he did not see the original movie over 10 times.)

The airplanes at the museum were okay too.  And we got to see the space arm – Canada’s contribution to NASA.    And (I know this makes little sense given my recent ravings about StarWars) the museum did confirm, I have no desire to be an astronaut.  None.  

We also visited the National Gallery.  The place is huge.  Their current show is on indigenous people.  It was very ‘artsy’  after discussion, I guess most of it made sense, but… It did nothing for me.

The last highlight of the day was visiting Canada’s cold war bunker just outside of town.  It was dated and very … scary really.  Knowing what we know now, it would not have saved anyone, but it was impressive – in both size and ideology.  Very…institutional, though I suppose what else would a government bomb shelter be?  It reminded me of the movies I saw as a kid in school… if  a nuclear bomb drops, we’ll all go to the shelter for a month…. Ah yeah. Right.

This is a bomb

The way in....

We did a fair amount of driving around too, saw Parliament, etc.  Very nice gothic like building.  The driving here, while still urban is so much better than Toronto. 

But perhaps my favorite part of Ottawa – is dead center in town they have an experimental farm.  A working farm and museum. (We did not go to pet the cows.)  But we did drive through the corn fields and gardens.  Pretty cool.

Downtown.  Really.

All in all, it’s a nice city.  I would come back and it’s only 1 hr from Syracuse or so they say.