Tulip Festival - Ottawa

Tickets for 2 - $104
Lunch for 2 - $32
Cruise for 2 - $32
Not having to drive for 10 hours - Priceless

We finally did go to Ottawa for tulip festival. To be honest I was disappointed, I guess in my head I was expecting to see something like tulips in Holland. And my expectations were raised, when I read there would be 300,000 flowers, but believe me, that isnt a big enough number if the tulips are scattered in small patches.

We decided to take the tour bus instead of driving (that was a good decision, otherwise, I would have had to hear earful from D after what we saw). If you guys are in Toronto, you would know the Safeway tours. These are tour bus operated mainly for the chinese community, the tour guide was chinese, our fellow passengers were chinese.

Our tour guide, Monica, was cute little chinese girl and her whole purpose of being on that bus was to prevent people from using the washroom on the bus.Once we got in the bus at chinatown in downtown toronto, she came upto each person and was asking "Did you use the washroom at your home before leaving?" Me and D tried hard not to laugh at her question.

We stopped at Markham and Scarborough to pick up some more passengers. At Markham, she repeated the drill, came to our seats "You ok, can you wait for 2 hours to use washroom?".

All through the trip, she made sure nobody used the washroom, everytime we got down, she would remind us to use the washroom in that place. Even before getting on the boat for the cruise on Rideau Canal, she came to everyone and said "Use the washroom on the boat".Her point was use washroom anywhere but in the bus,but the bummer did not come towards the end of the trip. Bus was stopped for 10mins photo time at the Parliment building. Since we already were there and it was raining, we returned early and guess what, as we entered the bus, a gentleman was coming out of the washroom.



Poor Monica, she couldnt stop this unstoppable gentleman from using the washroom on the bus, he probably just wanted to know how it felt like using the washroom on the bus, could be plain case of curiosity.

Another intersting thing that Monica did was, everything she told us what time to come back, she had a clock made of cardboard with movable hands and she would always show the time on that cardboard clock.Even then people would be late and she somehow managed to spot them and bring them back to bus.

Watched a chinese movie on the way to ottawa, this was like a typical hindi movie, a guy has a modern girlfriend, then meets a simple girl, falls in love with her.Some of the scenes from the movie could very well be passed off as a hindi movie.

On the way back to Toronto, saw 'Marlee and Me'.Cried my heart out when the dog died. I am not a dog person, but still was caught in the emotion.In the movie, Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson go to Ireland and stay in a B&B.That reminded of our B&B experience, am going to post that one of these days.

All in all, it was a fun day out. Will I suggest this, well if you have nothing exciting to do on a spring day and have $80 to spare , then give it a try. If not anything, the tour guide and fellow passengers will keep you entertained.

Pics in the next post.

Every journey teaches you something, I learned something too . I learned that thank you in chinese sounds something similar to "CiCi"(sounded like "see-see").I am not quite sure if it was Mandarin or Cantonese.

As usual, signing off with this quote

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” - St.Augustine