Stop the press! I found a comfortable pillow in the cupboard. I didn’t wake up with a headache this morning. Thought you’d like to know that.

This morning was mostly taken up sorting out tenant insurance for the new apartment, which Glen was able to do over the phone. We then went to the bank to talk to them about rushing the cheques to give to the realtors. It’s baffling that cheques are still the preferred method of payment for apartment rentals. It’s so inefficient.

Next we went to the women’s hospital to talk to Rosina as she’s involved with the fellows a lot. Really nice person, helpful too, lots of fun and was able to put us down for a couple of extra days off around the public holidays in this half of the year. It gives us the opportunity to plan slightly longer trips away, instead of just doing the weekend.

Lunch and then we walked to the apartment to see how long it takes from the hospitals. About 20 minutes at a brisk pace is the answer. We also met the property manager for the apartment building. When I say met, I mean we don’t know his name or really who he is but he did take a copy of our lease and order the woman at the concierge to find an opening for us to use the service elevator.

The woman, Marilyn, was a bit more helpful and told us what really goes on and that it shouldn’t be too hard to sneak into a lift, even when they’re all booked up as people often don’t show up. Excellent. Looks like we might be able to move things in on Friday after all.

Because we were near Bloor, we decided to head to the Royal Ontario Museum to check out the Mesopotamia exhibition. Our membership cards were ready (we hadn’t been called but decided to ask anyway) and we got into the museum for free. The woman who signed us up last week was at the entrance and remembered us. She was surprised the cards had been sorted so quickly. We joked that it looked like no one had died because we didn’t have a proper address to mail it out to. She laughed and wished us a good day.

I enjoyed the Mesopotamia exhibition though by this stage of the day (about 1:30 I think) our feet and backs were really sore. The exhibition featured real and replica objects from a variety of museums, mostly the British Museum, taken from Babylon, Assyria and Sumeria. The things that really stood out for me included:

• Mesopotamia had civilisations in it from 9000 BCE. I was surprised to find they went back that far.
• The Bisitun inscription, made by Darius the Great, was a Rosetta Stone for Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian. The same text was written for all three languages and this helped modern scholars translate these ancient languages.
• Cuneiform tablets sometimes came in stone envelopes, predating paper envelopes by millennia.
• The city of Ur was inhabited from 6000 BCE to 400 BCE. That’s one very old city.
• One of the burial pits, called the Great Death Pit, contained the bodies of 68 women and six guards. Scholars assume they were servants who “willingly” died for their master (in this case, a queen). I couldn’t help but wonder who did the killing and what an awful situation that would have been. Amazing to think that a ruler (even a dead one) had such overt control over the life and death of his or her subjects. And what a waste of human life.
• Leonard Woolley and his wife (and a few hundred workers) excavated the city of Ur. They were aided by a man called Max Mallowan, who later married Agatha Christie. Before I read his name on the plaque, I was thinking how I’d seen a documentary on Agatha Christie and that her and her husband went on archaeological digs. Turns out it was these ones at Ur.
• Lord Henry Layard was one of the first excavators of ancient Assyria. From various precious inscribed objects he found, he created a necklace for his wife (who was about half his age). His wife wrote in her diary that it was much admired when they dined with Queen Victoria. You can see a photo of the necklace here.
• There was a model of the Gates of Ishtar in Babylon. I remembered that we’d actually seen the real things at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. They’re so impressive and huge. I bet the British Museum wished they had them in their stores.
• The war in Iraq has destroyed countless artefacts, yet it feels wrong to care more about things than the countless lives that have been lost during the war.

Overall it was a pretty good exhibition. Not too heavy, easily accessible. The only comment I’d make is that it tried to make connections between ancient Mesopotamia and today, to show how one has influenced the other, which wasn’t sustained. There were a few instances of that, one right at the beginning where they talked about the importance of communication then and now, but there wasn’t an obvious effort throughout. A couple of spots had pods with video screens in them and I think these were where they wanted to make more of that connection but it felt a little separate from the action. Perhaps they had too many people curating it.

While in the museum we got messages and emails from the real estate agent saying we had to get the cheque for the apartment to the realtors today or else we might lose the apartment. Stress spike. According to the paper work, we had to give the deposit within 24 hours of accepting the offer. Wonderful. We didn’t think we’d be able to do it but after a couple of trips back and forth to the bank and withdrawing more money (as Glen’s big cheque still hadn’t cleared) we were able to get the money to the realtor just before 5pm. Plenty of stress but it all worked out in the end. So, it looks like we’re definitely moving in.

We then caught a streetcar down King St to have dinner at an all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ restaurant. We ate our fill and waddled back down Queen St to the apartment. Spending the night in. Our feet are so sore. I think we’re going to be using public transport a bit more this week.

I also received some sad news today that an old family friend passed away on Friday. She had been sick for a while, was 86 and in a hospice. I’m glad I got the chance to see her before I left and say a few goodbyes. Unfortunately I won’t be able to go to the funeral. That’s going to be one of the tough things about being here is that it’s so far from home and we’ll miss out on those big life events (good and bad). Thankfully we have email and Skype and digital photographs to make the distance that much smaller.