Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoNerd
But implying that the Nation's Capital is not worth visiting and it's only redeeming quality is Gat Park is just so beyond idiotic.
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The implication isn't that Ottawa isn't worth visiting - it's whether it's worth visiting
more than its nearby city cousins in Montreal and Toronto. You say Winterlude and I say Canada Exhibition, you say Bluesfest and I say F1 in Montreal, you say Escapade and I say OVO, you say Tulip Festival and I say Pride, you say Canada Day and I say TIFF. If Ottawa can find its niche in things like Winterlude then absolutely run with it, but even then it's facing competition in the form of Carnaval in Quebec.
Like I said previously, people don't primarily travel for museums. There's only a handful of museums that people travel internationally for, like the Louvre or MOMA, and that's basically it. People don't travel to Toronto exclusively to visit the ROM, and people don't travel to London exclusively to visit the National Portrait Gallery. They're great supplementary sidequests on otherwise busy vacations but they're not the primary reason for travelling. I don't think very many people are travelling to Ottawa to peer at Maman outside the Art Gallery, you know? Hell, DC has the Smithsonian museums, and those are
proper museums, and i'd still wager that more people visit the city for the White House or Capitol or Lincoln Memorial.
You can say that Ottawa's restaurant and shopping scene is great, but again once you compare it to nearby cities it's...not? Toronto is arguably one of the best food cities in the world, if not in the Western hemisphere, and Montreal is a diverse destination for shopping of all different kinds. Ottawa can't support a Holt Renfrew.
I'm not trying to be a downer on Ottawa or anything because it's a great city for the specific kind of people it attracts. This thread devolving into talk about museums and their focus simply highlights the kind of people that Ottawa attracts in general - people who fit neatly into government positions, bureaucratic, socially passive. All government cities are like this. Brasilia isn't
the destination to visit in Brazil. Canberra isn't
the destination to visit in Australia. Ottawa is no different.
The question shouldn't be '
what does Ottawa do well?', it should be
'What does Ottawa do better than anywhere else?', in particular Toronto and Montreal.
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It's a sidebar, but recently my partner was in the Middle East and spent about a month travelling around, primarily in Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Both of these countries are pushing their tourism industries hard to varying results. What you'll find in places like Qatar and the Arab Emirates is that local culture is...very sparse. The idea of culture in these places is simply to take the best things from other places and plant them into the Middle East. There's a famous restaurant in New York? Now it's in Dubai. There's a famous store in London? Now there's one in Qatar. It's the idea that culture can be bought and supplied and moved from one place to another as if it's equivalent. You can see this in, like, Las Vegas building an Eiffel Tower or something. It's not exactly the same thing no matter how similar it may be.
I bring this up because I see this sort of attitude at times in Ottawa. Maybe we should have a waterpark because they're popular elsewhere. Maybe we should have an aquarium because they're popular elsewhere. That's not a solution, you're merely replicating other places. What makes your city and region unique? That's what you build upon. Build that character and uniqueness and people will show up for it eventually.
I bring this up often to people in the Maritimes when they get excited about new franchise chains opening up. It's not unique or exciting or really noteworthy. Just supplanting local culture with franchise culture from elsewhere. Yawn.
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