The Capital of Canada - Day 11
Today...you guessed it...free breakfast!
It was the first day of rain and it was a mix of showers and some heavier downpour. Big thanks to Bryan for lending us umbrellas for the day!
We started off with trying to find parking after failing in one lot. After a long while of driving through the parkade, we found a spot!
We started off with a guided House of Commons Tour. We got to see the place where our MPs and Prime Minister debate on laws for our country.
The Central Block, sadly, is under renovation to restore the building, which will be completed in 2032. The House of Commons temporarily moved to the West Block. They moved the seats and a temporary speaker chair to the new building. The reason why all of the seats are green is because they based the House of Commons on the U.K.'s parliament but it is unknown why their seats are green.
After the tour, we walked to see an interactive parliament experience. It had an exhibit with some cool screens, which talked about the building, the art, and the old Central Block.
The next room had an interactive screen which showed that insides of the parliament and you could listen to the speeches of the members of parliament.
Then it was time for lunch. It was raining harder now so we basically ate at the first place we saw. It was a French bakery and cafe. We got a chicken pesto sandwich, ham and cheese croissant sandwich, a smoked salmon bagel, and a pulled-pork ciabatta. We also got a cookie and a lemon tart to share for dessert.
We walked towards the Mint for our next guided tour there.
Unfortunately, we couldn't take any photos or videos so their processes and machines can remain secret.
The Mint on Ottawa makes investment and collector coins while the Winnipeg does the circulation coins or the coins that goes throughout Canada. The Ottawa Mint also made the medals for the Vancouver Olympics and the Montreal Olympics back in the day. Interestingly, the Calgary Olympics got them from somewhere else.
The metals they use here are gold and silver which start out as ingots and then are melted and made into sheets. Those rolled up sheets can be worth millions and one gold roll is worth $115 million.
They are then cut out, polished, and stamped the design on. Investment coins focus on the weight of the metals, while collectors coins focus on looks and have to be the purest of gold and perfect. They hire people who can spot those small differences to examine each and every collectors coin make sure they are the finest quality. They told us that each collectors coins has to be checked by 15 people in order to pass it.
The Mint also did a project where they purified gold down to five 9s. The highest gold measurement in carats is 24, and four 9s (99.99%) is such a high number of carats that they can't calculate it. The Mint managed five 9s (99999) which means 99.999% of the coin is pure gold, which is crazy. They also spent some time taking about the coins that they make for each monarch that ruled.
It was raining a lot harder after the Mint so we waited inside for a bit, until it slowed down. Then we spent some time at the National Gallery.
Kids are free after 5, so this was a good, cheap way to spend time. There was a lot of contemporary Art exhibitions which are kind of hard to believe people can view that as art that should be in national museum.
Some people walked back to the car and others walked through the mall.
We met back up and drove to an Indian restaurant. But we struggled to find parking, so we headed to a different Indian restaurant which had its own lot to it. It was not busy at all which must have been because it was a Thursday and rainy. It was pretty good. We ordered butter chicken, coconut fish curry, and chicken Biryani, and of course naan.
We drove the scenic way back in hopes to spot some of the humongous groundhogs...and we spotted so many.
You would just see lumps on the side of the road which are the groundhogs are eating vegetation. There were actually a lot of them in that one spot and we even spotted an especially fat one. That satisfied our need to spot them again.
