We Remember

WARNING: Contains touching images. Maybe not ones that will touch you in a nice way like puppies and kittens. But they will be posted, and I cannot hide them behind a cut like on LiveJournal. All the photos below were taken by myself and cannot be reposted anywhere without my written consent. Some of these photos are photos I took of other photos, and in those cases, I will say so, and all rights etc belong to the person who originally took it (but the War Museum allows you to take photos in their exhibits, so I thought I would share for those who won't be going there - which is most of you who read this lol)


National War Memorial in Ottawa, ON, Canada.


Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Ottawa, ON, Canada


Soldiers standing around an inukshuk (The traditional meaning of the inukshuk is "Someone was here" or "You are on the right path.") Photo taken in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, ON, Canada


Crosses in a WWI cemetary in Europe.... crosses, row on row..... Photo is in a scrapbook in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, ON


Another Canadian cemetary in Europe from WWI. Photo is part of a slideshow/info on a computer at the War Museum in Ottawa. The angle was not the best :-/


Burial mound on a battlefield in WWI. Photo also part of a slideshow/info on a computer at the War Museum in Ottawa.


Bodies on the battlefield in WWI. Photo also part of slideshow/info on a computer at the War Museum.


The famous poem, In Flanders Fields, on the wall of the Memorial Chamber in the Center Block of the Parlaiment Buildings on Parlaiment Hill in Ottawa, ON, Canada.

Do you remember?

Ottawa, Part 2 - Canadian War Museum

So we've gone over the drive down on Sunday, and walking around Sunday evening in my previous post. Now we shall talk about Tuesday.

On Tuesday my mom and I walked from the hotel to the Canadian War Museum. Now usually I'm not a huge fan of war - I don't support them, nor do I have any real desire to join the military - but there are some aspects I do like to know about (i.e. as a kid I used to read all the young adult fiction about the Jewish families in hiding, the British children coming to Canada etc.) Anyways, this place is awesome. According to my family that lives in Ottawa, the War Museum has little, to nothing in storage. And given how much there is to see, I'd believe that. I also loved this place because I'm camera happy, and they tell you when you go in to take as many photos as you like (though some things have a sign of a flashing camera with a big red circle crossing the camera out - so no FLASH photography of paintings (obviously. The flash destroys the paint.)

Currently the Museum has an exhibit about Camouflage - from battlefield to catwalk. It's very interesting. They show different types of uniforms over the years, and how different countries have different patterns. They also show how some of it is made/how it was made. They also have a video playing where one half of the screen is actual miltary use of camo, and the other half is models wearing camo on the runways. In this exhibit they also had displays about dazzle ships, which I found absolutely awesome (so awesome I want to buy a model ship and dazzle paint it lol.) They have a periscope simulation where you look though the thing, and it shows boats (with dazzle camo) on the water, and you have to determine which way the boats are headed. It's actually rather hard. The exhibit also features things like fake trees, parachuting decoys, and other military decoys. Then they have actual designers clothes from the catwalk - dresses mostly. They also show how camouflage patterns have been used in fashion/non-military use for things like toys, and packaging.

After leaving that exhibit, we returned into the main galleries, and we mistakenly ended up starting with the more recent wars/military involvements, rather than starting back in about the 1600s where they talk about what the people coming to Canada would have had with them, as well as what the natives would have used. So we went back in time instead of starting earlier in time.

They have a lot of weapons on display - stone and wood clubs, knives and swords, guns ranging from pistols to rifles to machine guns, the BIG guns, and assorted vehicles and tanks. I was very excited about tanks. I like tanks. I want to own a tank. It would make parking near the doors of stores sooo much easier... Back on track now... they also have a wide variety of uniforms on display. There is also art work, and a lot of hands on things. There were a few displays where it looked like you could walk through them etc, my mom walked through the trench one, though I wasn't really sure if you were supposed to or not, and felt kind of bad about walking all over a display.

So as I said in my last paragraph, there is a trench you can (apparently) walk through - you see how tall they were, where soldiers slept, etc. They also had a VERY realistic scene from the battlefields of Passchendaele. The walls had realistic murals of the landscape on them, the ground featured boardwalks, fake mud, crater holes filled with water, weapons etc abandoned to the mud (it rained for 3 months straight at Passchendale) and also a dead soldier lost to the mud (since it rained so much and there were crater holes everywhere, the mud and water were deep that people did drown in them.) If you are a person who has been in battles, please evaluate your sanity before going here. It's an awesome place, but if you've done military time and have been known to have episodes/flashbacks/insane moments I'm not really sure what to call, exercise caution. Unlike a lot of museums, the War Museum has noise. They have soundtracks playing in different exhibits - as in gunfire, bombs/artillery fire, and the like. They also have the realistic scenes of the trenches and Passchendaele (not sure if those would cause anything or not, warfare has changed, but maybe not that much), and they also have some very graphic photos of bodies etc. That said, the majority of the museum is awesome and family friendly etc.

There's a lot of movies playing as well. We didn't really watch any... occassionally I, personally, found it hard to follow them, just because they weren't very loud (most likely to not disturb people looking at other things nearby), so I would try to follow the subtitles - which, due to Ottawa being our country's capital, being right beside Quebec, and being bilingual (English and French for official languages), were in French. My French isn't quiiite that good. One of the best movies/visual demonstrations I loved, was the Armageddon simulation... basically, there's a flat screen TV on the wall. Underneath that are three buttons. Each button shows how a different thing stands up to nuclear Armageddon. Needless to say... I think the forest won (or at least unlike the house and transport truck, only one tree out of the forestted area shown wasn't still standing at the end.) Kind of scary, but also kind of like "Coooolll!!!" The house was awesome... you watch a curtain of nuclear whatever go flying past continually and the house just slowly starts to smoke/turn to ash on the outside and then it just flies apart like it's being hit by a tornado.

As I said, they also have a lot of vehicles on display - cars, trucks, armoured vehicles, planes, helicopters, tanks... They have a whole gallery dedicated to tanks, big trucks, cannons, etc called the Le Breton Gallery. There is also a Canadian Air Force fighter of some sort. I picked out a few tanks I would like to won, the winner being a Self-propelled Howlizter



So before I give it all away, there is A LOT to see and do, and a lot of interesting stuff to be learned. There's some stuff in there you don't even expect to see - slideshows on computers you can look through, another computer that accesses the WWI Canadian soldier Attestation Papers (you can't print them though, but they do say which website you're using, so you can go home and print them off... collectionscanada.com or some such) and yeah, there's just a lot of cool stuff.

It does take most of a day, but it's worth it. There is a restaurant on site called The Mess, it's mainly a cafeteria style of food already prepared that you just grab, which is fine. Both museum admission and food are reasonably priced, and oddly enough, so was the gift shop... lol. Or at least what I was looking at was. I didn't look at the book selection too much, but I would imagine even those were fairly priced for the book.

After seeing the War Museum we walked back to the hotel, stopping by the Garden of the Provinces and Territories - which, being autumn, didn't seem to have a lot of plant life... it was kind of a stone terrace with trees, and it went up the hill from the road to the doors of a church, so yeah... not so sure it has real flowers, or if it's just the painted stone ones on the stone rails around the terrace thing. The fountain was cool though.

Upon arriving back to the hotel we grabbed showers to ease sore feet and legs, and then relaxed until my dad got done work. Then we just went across the road to the Glue Pot Pub and had supper (THEY HAVE YUMMY RIBS!!! [Can you tell I was sick of italian food? lol] And the lasgana is apparently delicious as well, but it's not a main menu item, just a speical offer item. It looked yummy though. Mom had it Thursday night, and dad finished it for her and said it was good too. More about that in the post about Thursday though.) After finishing supper we decided to walk down to the Rideau Center mall and Byward Market. It was a mistake. Mom and I were more tired and sore than expected, and the walk took longer than we thought, or seemed to anyways, and was also very cold. Needless to say, upon arriving at the mall, it was only about an hour to closing, and none of the stores were any we shop in anyways. Byward Market was mostly closed up as well. Mom and I would have rather stayed at the hotel and just relaxed and watched TV I think lol. Which is what we did when we got back.

And now, everyone's favourite part... PICTURES!!! I won't give too much away though :p

The War Museum as viewed from across the road on the way back from the museum...


One of Hitler's Parade cars, complete with bullet holes


So the next post will cover Wednesday, Thursday and Friday as not a huuuge amount happened lol