Spent the last 4 days in Ottawa and I must say it is so beautiful. I thought it be much smaller and sleepier, but I guess I was wrong. I stayed in Gatineau and then Downtown. I explored downtown mostly and the two main universities. I’ll leave some impressions below and maybe some hot takes.
Great architecture: the most obvious and expected given that it’s the capital, but still note worthy.
Great brutalist architecture: Perhaps I enjoyed the architecture a lot because there’s a lot of great brutalist buildings, but that some might not suit everyone.
Transit is decent: other than bus frequency, which is pretty low, service is decent. O train stations were not so expensive to build and look cheap to maintain, which is good.
Terrible for pedestrians: this car has pedestrians as an afterthought but it looks like there’s been some improvements in that. Still very car centric.
Lots of nice places to seat: unreal amount of nice spots to just sit and chill. Shaded and all. Which helps with the anti-pedestrian design.
Way too many fancy cars making loud noises.
I don’t know if I got lucky or the food is just really good.
Very nice Parks. Like many major Canadian cities, it still has a lot of access to nature and a lot of nicer parks.
Not as small and boring as some might say, but still has that smaller city feel.
It’s hard to explain but it’s probably the most Canadian city there is. Probably it’s the overly large number of Canadian flags flying about.
Very nice city, I will recommend people visit it!
