Ottawa

Until I planned this trip, I'm not sure I could have identified Ottawa as the capital of Canada. But now I have learned about 1000% more about the Canadian government.

I tacked on a one-day vacation to my work trip, reasoning that it might be decades before I came to Ottawa again. Yesterday I toured Parliament, which is the building that houses the Members of Parliament and the Senate. There are very few tourists in Ottawa in January, so my tour group was given lots of time to poke around. One of the most surprising facts I learned (mainly from the tour guide's reaction to one of my questions) is that most Americans think we won the War of 1812 and most Canadian think they won the War of 1812. Upon later reading, I learned that the British don't waste any time thinking about that inconsequential war, and historians are divided.

View from the Peace Tower at Parliament Hill

My timing was fortuitous, because in about a week the building will close and will not reopen for at least ten years. This is part of an ambitious renovation plan, in which they will remove every stone, take it off-site, and clean it. They will then reconstruct everything, placing every stone in the original position, and replace all the wiring, plumbing, carpets, etc. This plan does not seem terribly efficient to me, but perhaps I am a cold, non-traditional American who does not value historic buildings enough.

And to be fair, I am a cold American. It didn't makes sense to to take a taxi or Uber when all the students were hiking. In addition, they are having trouble keeping up with the plowing and there aren't many cars on the road. When I travel, I like to walk to gain perspective on the city and to get exercise. But today I may splurge on one car trip, because dragging my suitcase in the snow yesterday was rough going.

My new-found government knowledge also helps me understand an event at the conference. These conferences are for undergraduate women physicists. Often, senior women in physics will make extra effort to attend and participate in these conferences, even though the audience is smaller and less influential than those they normally talk to, because these women want to support those following in their footsteps. The third woman to ever receive a Nobel Prize in Physics, which happened in 2018, spoke at the meeting. Just like the other participants, I was excited. However, I was puzzled at the gasps of delight when they played a recorded video greeting by a bilingual woman who welcomed us to tho conference and told us about the importance of physics. After my trip to Parliament, I realized the woman was Julie Payette, the Governor General of Canada, who is the Queen's representative in Canada; she also happens to be an astronaut who worked on the ISS. Now I feel just a little bit more culturally aware.