Hello Canada!

23^th June Thursday

At about 6 in the morning we all stopped at a place called Buffalo to use their restrooms, and then a few hours later we had to cross the border at Port Erie. This was a crazy amount of effort for that time in the morning, because we had to unload the entire luggage section of the coach, plus all the overhead lockers etc, and show our passports, and answer some very complicated questions (e.g. how long are you staying? Have you been here before? Why are you here?) Then we had to put all our luggage back on the coach about 2 metres further along from where we’d unloaded. We were officially now in Canada!!

We arrived in Toronto at about 10am, and in order to collect our next set of tickets (to Ottawa), we had to present our reference number. Which we’d temporarily lost. As a result, we had a nice little excursion of Toronto to try and find some wifi, to get onto Gillian’s email, to find this reference number. We were running out of time, and had just bought breakfast (bagels and cups of tea/ coffee) which we were clinging onto whilst dragging our cases around town (I’m pretty sure we left a trail of bits of cream cheese and bread behind us). After following many different people’s instructions, we chanced upon the most beautiful sight- a Starbucks. We were all well aware of Starbucks free wifi. With the newly gained reference number in hand, we raced back to the bus station, and arrived just in time to get our next 5 hour coach journey to Ottawa.

We spend most of the coach journey catching up on sleep we’d lost from the previous night, and arrived in Ottawa later that afternoon. It was very hot, and a seriously long walk was required to get to the hostel. We seemed to be dragging our suitcases through unknown cities a lot recently.

The hostel was another Hostelling International, but with a twist. It was a converted jail house, closed in 1972 for inhumane living conditions, and later became a hostel. Doesn’t that just fill you with a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

We were in a 8-bed mixed dorm, and had some interesting roomies. This one guy, Ian, who had crazy, peroxide blonde hair which seemed to make he was in a permanent state of electric shock, was really nice and gave us some good advice on what to do whilst there.

Staying at that hostel was an interesting experience, and made us all realise what zoo animals must feel like all the time. Because of the interesting heritage of the building, there were school groups being led around on part of a tour for most of the evening. A lot of the kids looked at us as if we were completely off our rockers, asking incredulously “why are they eating here?”. Our dinner that night was good, so maybe they were just jealous.

We’d been to the grocery store and bought ourselves some bread rolls, tomato, vegetable, and broccoli soup. The soups were delicious, but didn’t initially look all that appetising; we had to add water to this paste and microwave it, and we were a bit repulsed by the gooey, separated, watery mixture it started out as. By our expert use of the microwaves it looked and smelt like gourmet soup though, so it was worth it.

We did a bit of planning for the next few days using the hostel’s wifi, and used the showers. They  were in the old cells complete with heavy doors with ominous locks. Thankfully the school tours didn’t reach the showers, although they would have been in for a treat! That night there was a thunderstorm. Gillian and Bessie battled the weather like troopers to check out a few of Ottawa’s bars. It was their first time out (legally) for over a month and their first time out in Canada. Fully embracing the culture, they went first to a Scottish pub and then an Irish one, getting soaked on the way.  Alice was lame (“sensible”) and went to bed.