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Published: January 4th 2017
The Golden Nugget
@ the Royal Canadian MintThis morning, Renata and I woke up early to make are way for our morning tour of the Royal Canadian Mint. The Royal Canadian Mint produces Canada’s official and collector coins.
On the tour we learned about how coins and the Vancouver 2010 Olympic medals were made. The wavy face of the Vancouver Olympic medals evoke the Vancouver-Whistler landscape. No two Olympic medals are the same. If you place all the same coloured medals together they will form two large master artworks; an orca whale for the (Olympics) and the raven for the (Paralympic). The Orca symbolizes powerful and knowing no boundaries while the Raven symbolizes creativity and agility.
After the tour we got the chance to hold a golden nugget worth over $750, 000. It felt good to be rich for a second with the added benefit of strengthening my arm muscles!
After a brief lunch at a restaurant nearby we headed to the Canadian Museum of History. Some of the interesting exhibits we saw were the Napoleon and Paris exhibit, the Gold Rush exhibit, the Horse Power exhibit
and the Grand Hall.
In the grand hall there was this interesting plaster sculpture called the Spirt of Haida Gwaii. It shows a traditional Haida cedar dugout canoe which carries the various symbolic characters including the beaver, eagle, frog, wolf, killer whale, and the raven. The passengers although diverse and not always in harmony must rely on one another to survive. The fact the Raven, the trickster holds the steering oar symbolizes the unpredictability of nature.
Tonight we stayed at the 4 star Ottawa Marriot hotel paid for by Renata’s work. We had an incredible view of downtown Ottawa from our room.
Tomorrow is the start of Renata’s pharmacology conference and my last day in Ottawa. So I better make the best of it. I will try to fit in the Canadian Nature Museum, Rideau Hall and the National Gallery of Canada all in one day.
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