Terry's Travel and Thoughts: Ottawa again-The good and the not so good

I have to confess that Ottawa represents a sort of unreal idealised place to me. Since I left at around 21, I've been to a lot of different places and seen a ton of shitty things: poverty, violence, racist madness etc. I always filtered that stuff through a rather (unrealistic) view in that I would often think that's not the kind of stuff that would happen where I grew up.
It did then and it does now.
I'll get to all this negative stuff a little later.
First lets look at the showcase side of the city.
As the Nation's Capital, Ottawa is clean and full of the monuments that school kids read about.
Growing up was full of the usual early years soccer/baseball/football fun.
Small Town America.
Canada is after all, the North Eastern US with gun control and socialised medicine.
The Brit connection never went beyond the picture of the Queen on the coin and paper money.
Unlike the rest of the Commonwealth, Canada never put its energy into beating the home country at cricket , rugby and soccer. We were never a Pakistan/India/Australia/Kiwi-land trying to out Brit the Brits.
Margaret Atwood was the best we could do in literature.
It was all Blue Jays, Expos (now defunct) and ice hockey, which when I was growing up ,was not the sport of snowbird states as it is now, but of the North East.
Ottawa was a good place to grow up.
As I said, it's clean relatively crime free and the federal government being based there meant that a solid middle class formed the bedrock of the tax paying public.
Today it seemed pretty much the same at the start of my afternoon.

The locks and canal are central to the city. Colonel By built them and they link a waterway right through to Lake Ontario.
The Rideau Canal is the longest skating rink in the world in the winter and many a kid in the city knows the ritual of heading out onto the ice with his parents in February. I used to skate from Carleton University at Mooney's Bay/Hogs Back to downtown on many a Friday night.

In front of the Chateau Laurier Hotel, just east of Parliament Hill is the war memorial. A while back I posted about it (amongst other things) here.
When I was last in Ottawa, much was made of a 20 something having a post booze-up piss on the granite blocks surrounding the monument and in true Canadian fashion, he wasn't lynched nor jailed; he said he was sorry and all was forgiven.
Today there's an honour guard of sorts- part timers who still manage to pull off the desired effect.

It was bloody hot today and talking to one of the guys after he finished he told me he felt like he was melting.
"Still its better than getting my balls blown off in Afghany ....eh?
I swear to god he said "eh"
Wait you're not some kind of journalist right?"
No I'm not.
The reason I went downtown today was because of an article I came across by chance in the local section of the "Ottawa Citizen".
It reported that the Sandy Hill area of town was under a siege of sorts from crack users and hookers.
In true T fashion I set off to see if I could document this decline of an area that I used to live in. Unfortunately all is not right in the part of town I used to live. (-I accidentally deleted a picture of a squalid little alley full of condoms and discarded clothes and I can't get it to re-post.)

When I lived in Sandy Hill, my landlady was an 85 year old Jewish lady who used to feed me half frozen fish fingers and press ghastly sweet Israeli wine on me and get me to stay "just 20 minutes more".
She was lonely and lovely and decent.
Very decent.
She used to tell me that I would go to hell if I kept eating hotdogs.
"You may think its smart eating those things, but they're banned for a reason"
One night I heard her crying out as some vagrant tried to force his way into her house. We shared the same porch and I was downstairs in roughly 30 seconds.
In true 22 year old fashion I gave him an outraged hiding and sat with her for hours afterwards drinking weak tea and thinking the world was going to hell.
I guess the neighbourhood was going to shit even then.......