Of a Canadian sojourn

Its been an interesting couple of weeks thanks to a sudden trip to Ottawa for the GCC summit and work related activities. It was a good trip to Ottawa, meeting for the first time, names that are so active on a mailing list and figuring out that everyone looks so different from what you expect them to be . Travelling to North America for an Indian Vegetarian is quite a daunting task since vegetarianism has been stretched to include fish and chicken in certain cuisines. However this time was rather interesting as one met an alumnus from my school and also working on compilers. Now take that for a coincidence. Incidentally he had the same teensy weensy problem that I had which was that of being a vegetarian :) So there was company to try and explore cuisine other than that provided by Subway or Starbucks or Tim Hortons ..

There's this Moroccan place in Ottawa that claims to serve the best vegetarian food and they certainly lived up to their expectations. So we survived on whatever they served us as vegetarian - the bread was a cross between an aaapam, a dosa made of Ragi something that tamilians would understand and the side dishes were made of lentils (dal) , sundal (black peas ?) and a chutney that would make the gonghura tear up because of the heat generated :) .

The dinner next day was spent in visiting a place run by Chinmaya Mission in Ottawa a 100% vegetarian joint ! (WOW!) Take that all you carnivores who sneer at vegetarians travelling to any place outside India ! In the middle of all this one managed to attend the lectures that were on at the summit , quite a few interesting ones at that .

Roaming about the malls looking for stuff strangely left me less lighter on the wallet than I expected thanks to the appreciating rupee. I bought a MP3 turn table for my parents, a Wii for the kalculator , a number of small little things here and there which were special requests from folks back in India. Last but not the least one did manage to pick up Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and finish it on the flight from Ottawa to Toronto. Enjoyed this book , she's tied up all the loose ends in this one and almost *everyone* involved in the series so far has a reference . No more school boy stuff but lots of stuff where it gets like the lord of the rings / return of the king . There are many people dead but one death makes all the headlines and that sparks some interesting reactions among people ...