{"id":1713,"date":"2011-09-16T19:14:09","date_gmt":"2011-09-17T02:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nerdhive.org\/glob\/?p=1713"},"modified":"2012-05-26T19:44:49","modified_gmt":"2012-05-27T02:44:49","slug":"ottawa-day-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/?p=1713","title":{"rendered":"Ottawa day 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

2011\/09\/16<\/p>\n

Short drive from Montreal this morning, got a room, then spent the day being a tourist.<\/p>\n

First stop: the Canadian War Museum<\/a>.\u00a0 It was pretty interesting and I could easily have spent a whole afternoon there.\u00a0 They have a good collection of tanks and some rather odd vehicles for various countries.\u00a0 A few pictures:<\/p>\n

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Next I went to the Currency Museum<\/a>, which is free.\u00a0 It was pretty fascinating, actually – I took my time in this one.\u00a0 They have a great collection and it renewed my interest in coin and banknote collecting.<\/p>\n

Here’s a couple of historic units of trade I had always wondered about, mostly thanks to reading the Asterix books.\u00a0 The first is a Talent, and the round ones are Sestertii.<\/p>\n

\"d20110916_0103\"<\/a>\"d20110916_0113\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Early Canada had a lot of competing currency issuers.\u00a0 Many of them had to perpetrate some hacks or do outright illegal things in the interest of practicality or to get around overbearing regulations imposed from overseas.\u00a0 Witness the $4, $6 and $7 bills: (click for full size to read the legend)<\/p>\n

\"d20110916_0162\"<\/a><\/p>\n

And here’s the largest legal banknote ever issued in Canada: $50,000, legal only for exchange between banks (ie not publically available).<\/p>\n

\"d20110916_0171\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I then went and walked around the Parliament buildings a bit:<\/p>\n

\"d20110916_0207\"<\/a>\"d20110916_0215\"<\/a>\"d20110916_0274\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s a very, very nice building.\u00a0 I really like it – fantastic stone work.\u00a0 There are several other very nice, large stone buildings in the area too.<\/p>\n

And here’s the Rideau Canal:<\/p>\n

\"d20110916_0309\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By this time all the tourist attractions were closed and I was hungry, so on the recommendation of a co-worker I ate at Chez Lucien<\/a>, which is just around the corner from where he used to live in Bytown.\u00a0 It’s a small place but popular, and was super crowded.\u00a0 I had the Lucien Burger, which has bacon and cream cheese on it.\u00a0 It was pretty tasty – that’s actually a good combination.<\/p>\n

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2011\/09\/16 Short drive from Montreal this morning, got a room, then spent the day being a tourist. First stop: the Canadian War Museum.\u00a0 It was pretty interesting and I could easily have spent a whole afternoon there.\u00a0 They have a good collection of tanks and some rather odd vehicles for various countries.\u00a0 A few pictures: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-sightseeing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1713"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2271,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1713\/revisions\/2271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.soleillapierre.ca\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}