Antiquity in an Evening

It was our anniversary this week. We had planned to have a romantic picnic down by the canal, but it rained for the first time during an evening in the last three months. It rained on our wedding day too and on our first anniversary when we were in Lisbon! Not deterred we had our picnic in our living room.

Unusually for us, we went out on a school night this week. However, this can be explained by the fact that museums in Ottawa are generally free to visit on Thursday evenings! This week we went to the Civilisation Museum and saw the IMAX film Mysteries of the Nile and we saw the Pompeii exhibit.

I’d never been to an IMAX theatre before. They are different to normal cinemas because the screen is like looking into a really large bowl and the film is shown using two projectors, which gives really good 3D effect. Sarah didn’t like the fast moving sequences as they make her tummy turn over. The film itself was only ok as they didn’t explain any of the Nile’s Mysteries. It really was just find any excuse to film scenes that would look good on an IMAX screen.

The Pompeii exhibit was very interesting. There were casts of some of the people who had been buried by the ash from the eruption, artefacts from daily life in a Roman city and stories about the panic on the day of the eruption. I don’t know how archaeologists know these things, but the stories sound as terrifying as it must have been to have been there.