Topical Tens: 7th August: Ottawa

Monday 7 August 2017

7th August: Ottawa

On this date in 1858, Queen Victoria chose Ottawa to be the capital of the Dominion of Canada.

Ottawa was originally called Bytown after Colonel John By, the engineer who oversaw construction of the Rideau Canal. The name changed to Ottawa, which derives from the Algonquin word adawe – which means to trade - in 1855.
The city is located at the confluence of three major rivers: the Ottawa River, the Gatineau River and the Rideau River. The rivers were important for the logging trade.
There's also Bytown's canal, the Rideau Canal, originally built to provide a secure route between Montreal and Kingston on Lake Ontario, avoiding the stretch of the St. Lawrence River bordering the state of New York where the British forces had been easily exposed to American enemy fire during the War of 1812. Today it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site because it is the best preserved example of a slackwater canal built in North America with most of its 19th century structures still intact. In Winter, the canal freezes over and becomes the world's longest skating rink -7.8km long.
It gets cold in the winter. The average annual snowfall in Ottawa is 236 centimetres (92.8 inches) and Ottawa is the seventh coldest capital in the world after Ulaan-Baatar in Mongolia, Astana in Kazakhstan, Moscow, Helsinki, Reykjavik in Iceland and Tallin in Estonia.
In terms of area, Ottawa is 3.5 times the size of Greater London but the population is less than 1/7 of the population of Greater London.
Famous people from Ottawa include: Paul Anka, Singer; Margaret Atwood, Writer, Dan Aykroyd, Comedian, singer, actor and screenwriter; Alanis Morissette, Singer-songwriter, and Matthew Perry, Actor.
Ottawa is twinned with Beijing, Cairo and Catania, Italy.
There are about 35 annual festivals which take place in the city, encompassing music, dance, film, a Dragon Boat Festival, a Writers' Festival and perhaps the most famous, the Tulip Festival.
If you're planning to visit there are some interesting places to stay, including a hostel that was once a prison and the Château Laurier Hotel, which is haunted by the ghost of Charles Melville Hays, the president of the company that built the hotel. He died on the Titanic, 12 days before the hotel opened.
There is a statue of Samuel De Champlain holding an astrolabe - but since the sculptor had no idea what the instrument was for, he carved it so that De Champlain is holding the astrolabe upside down.