It's a Canadian thing. (Apparently.)

Today I'm in Ottawa, our nation's capital. I haven't been here for 20 years, almost exactly. One of the first sights I lay eyes on as I head out for breakfast is Barrymore's, the venerable concert venue where This "Blue Piano" once knocked 'em dead. Brings back some fond, if exceedingly vague, memories.

Anyway.

Our meetings are over, and very productive too. So here J-P. and I are ambling around the city, playing accidental tourist and working off our dinner, with J-P. telling me about his 61-day walking pilgrimage across France and Spain (!). Eventually we find ourselves at the House of Parliament. We stroll practically right up to the front doors, virtually unmolested. And when someone finally does approach us it's not an RCMP officer, or a CSIS agent, or even a pimple-faced rent-a-guard on a rusty bike, but some cigarette-puffing, beer-gutted yokel in a baseball cap and t-shirt who says, "Would you mind walking a little further down there, to the right? The light show is starting in 5 minutes and we'd like to keep this area clear."

Two things strike me about this situation: one, even though Parliament may not be in session right now (or is it? I haven't been near a newspaper or TV for a week!), we're apparently not too concerned with security at the capitol buildings. If this were the U.S., we might have been stopped -- likely by a phalanx of gun-toting types -- and inquisitioned long before we'd managed to get this far.

The second thing that hits me is: did he just say "light show"?

"It's a Canadian thing," Mr. Smoke-and-cap explains. As if he thinks we're from some distant land. Like Vancouver, or Saguenay. (Which we are, but that's beside the point.) And as if this is how we Canucks all typically spend our weekday evenings. Turns out that what he really means is that the show's theme is, well, Canadiana.

Intrigued, we do as requested (like any polite Canadian would, thereby blowing his theory out of the water) and obediently walk back toward the roadway; if you've ever seen pictures of Parliament, you know it's set back a fair ways from the street, separated by a wide lawn. Along the way we're serenaded by a pre-recorded Shania Twain and an assortment of other oh-so-obviously and tragically Canadian artists booming from the sound system. We stop in behind some modest bleacher stands set up for the express purpose. And then the light show begins.

You have to see it to really get the full effect, but essentially this light show consists of a series of projections that are cast onto the face of the Parliament buildings, including the Peace Tower: standard Canadian scenes of majestic mountains, maple leaves, Niagara Falls, towering forests, First Nations masks, you get the idea. It's accompanied by (very loud) sound effects of -- you guessed it! -- loon calls, aboriginal song, roaring fires, steam trains, the lot, along with the requisite (and fully bilingual) melodramatic narration. Some of these colours and images were more abstract than others, and some simulated movement. Did I mention they were projected onto the Parliament buildings?

Now, standing there straight as an arrow without the benefit of so much as a glass of beer or wine with dinner, the whole thing came off as ludicrously... well, I don't know, maybe cheesy is too polite a word. Crass, perhaps. Gimmicky. Touristy. Tacky. Cheap. Even if it was free. Imagine a PowerPoint presentation but with a bigger slides, set to bland Top 40 music (which is apparently all any Canadian artists of renown have ever produced), and used to light up your neighbourhood brothel. You get the idea.

Perhaps under other circumstances -- like, say, if we'd taken a hit off the ceramic Simpsons-head bongs proudly displayed in the head shops further down Wellington Street -- I can imagine that it might have had a somewhat different effect. But as it was, we just shrugged and moved on. For some strange reason it almost gave me a lump in my throat.

But for sheer entertainment value it didn't compare with what greeted us at the very next street corner. A young and not unattractive woman approached us, gesticulated at the metal "telephone" sign attached to the corner of the building and asked if we knew where said apparatus was. We explained that we weren't from the area (apparently we don't look that much like tourists!) and that we didn't know. She then went on to explain that she was visiting a friend who lived in an apartment tower across the street and down a block, and who wondered whether people at our location could look up and see into his/her apartment from that vantage point. So naturally she volunteered to come down and conduct an empirical investigation into the matter, albeit sans cellular. (What else are you gonna do in Ottawa on a Thurday night?) No problem -- no sooner had we revealed our ignorance than she spotted said phone, waved cheerfully, and trotted off to report her findings to her friend.

And they call Ottawa "the city that never wakes up."

Up obscenely early again tomorrow... but at least we're headed back to Montreal, for the final pre-London leg of my trip. Good night.

(Oh bugger. The wireless is now on the fritz, and I can't get connectivity... this post is going to have to be saved until tomorrow. Has Mercury gone retrograde again? Which reminds me, my e-mail issues are still not fully resolved either. Damn.)