Author Archives: Meg

Babymoon! Or, three Telsons go to Athens.

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Sadly, this is our last “big” trip for the summer – but the reason behind it is a happy one! In case you missed our last postcard, we’re having a baby in August, which means that in a couple weeks I won’t be allowed to fly anywhere for a while. So we made sure to get in one “last” trip before then, and took a long weekend to Athens to enjoy some warmth and sunshine.

Sightseeing in Athens can be a bit difficult to plan, since many of the archaeological sites close at 3pm daily (we’re curious to know who thought this was a good idea, especially in the summer). But we squeezed a lot into just over three days, and I was especially delighted to be able to see in person so many sites and artifacts from my college archaeology course. We started with a visit to the Acropolis Museum, which contains artifacts from the buildings atop the oldest inhabited area of Athens (minus about half the sculptures from the Parthenon, appropriated in the early 19th century and now housed – wrongly, we think – in Britain). The following day we took a self-guided walking tour which included a number of Byzantine churches, the Arch of Hadrian, the Temple of Olympian Zeus (the largest temple in Greece during the Roman empire), and a maze-like walk through a gorgeous little neighborhood that straddles the Acropolis cliffside. This was the only overcast day on our trip, and also the only time we were able to climb the Acropolis, but the Parthenon and other temples were breathtaking nonetheless. On Sunday we visited the National Archaeological Museum, which houses the burial treasures from Myceneae, and had a temporary exhibition of incredible bronzes and fragments of an exquisite mathematical/astronomical mechanism – basically the first analog computer – from the Antikythera shipwreck; we also made short visits to the Ancient Agora and the Panathenaic Stadium (site of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896). On Monday we took a full-day bus tour to the Peloponnese to visit the acoustically-marvellous Epidaurus theater and the 4,000-year-old city of Mycenae (seeing the Lion Gate here was a treat for me, having recreated it out of snow with classmates during my freshman year of college). After a similarly frustrating experience in Cuba we now know that bus tours are not our thing, since we spent more time stopping for food and shopping than seeing the actual sites themselves!

It was a bit of a whirlwind weekend and we’re happy to be back home (my back and legs are relieved for the comfort of a cushy office chair during the day), but we saw some amazing things…and the little one is quickly becoming one well-traveled baby!

Winter holiday in Budapest

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Wow, our first real trip in nearly six months! We need to get out more…

Over the weekend we took a 4-day trip to Budapest, Hungary (which inevitably resulted in lots of jokes from Josh whenever I said we should get something to eat). Historically, this city is two in one: quieter old-town Buda on the west side of the Danube, and busier, hipper Pest on the east. We stayed at a lovely B&B in Buda, one stone staircase downhill from Buda Castle and 700-year-old Matthias Church; our bedroom windows looked east across the Danube to the spindly, red-roofed national Parliament building. We wanted this to be a relaxing trip, so we took our time with a couple of self-guided walking tours, visits to the Opera House, Hungarian National Museum, and House of Terror (housed in the former communist secret police headquarters); and to St Stephen’s Basilica (home to the actual right hand of St Stephen, first king of Hungary), the Jewish Cemetery and Holocaust Memorial Park at the Dohány Street Synagogue, and the vast Central Market Hall. We spent a couple hours each day having coffee/tea and cake in traditional cafes, and savored national dishes including chicken paprikás, gulyás (goulash) soup, Lángos, chocolate mousse-like Rigó Jancsi cake, and poppyseed-stuffed crepes. YUM.

Sunday was the day-long Bartók marathon at the Palace of the Arts concert hall; when we stopped by to get tickets for a performance of the Miraculous Mandarin, we got lucky and also snagged fantastic seats for a later performance of Bluebeard’s Castle, with the world-renowned Budapest Festival Orchestra. Neither of us are huge opera fans, but the orchestral music was incredible.

We ended our trip on Monday with a morning-long soak at the Széchenyi baths, the largest medicinal bath in Europe. The indoor baths, quite green due to their mineral concentration, were great for a calm soak, but our favorite was the outdoor (yep, even in February!) thermal “amusement” pool with whirlpools and massaging water jets…the perfect way to end a holiday!

Éire, Part Two

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The second week of our trip was a mix of old and new: it started off with a hike through the forest in Cong and a big band show at a pub in Galway. On Tuesday we took a ferry to windy Inishmore, the largest of the three Aran Islands, and biked through some very rocky hillsides out to Dún Aonghasa, a semi-circular Iron Age fort on the edge of a cliff that drops over 100 meters to the sea. On our way north to [London]derry (site of the 1972 Bogside Massacre/Bloody Sunday), we stopped off at the Carrowmore megalithic cemetery, Sligo abbey, and the Donegal castle; from Derry we visited the Old Bushmills Distillery, and hiked to the bizarre yet magnificent Giant’s Causeway, a tumble of over 40,000 interlocking hexagonal basalt columns. (Followers of our last trip will appreciate these two photos). Thursday saw us in Belfast where we visited the requisite Titanic sites, toured City Hall (it was the previous Lord Mayor’s last day in office!), and visited the Linen Hall Library with a great exhibition of political posters from the Troubles of the late 1960s.

After Belfast, we continued south to Dublin via Brú na Bóinne, a prehistoric megalithic site that is home to the three enormous mound and passage tombs of Dowth (unexcavated), Knowth (the largest, with passages aligned with the Equinox sunrise and sunset), and Newgrange (the most well-known, with a cross-shaped passage aligned with the winter Solstice sunrise, which you can go into). These monuments are over 5,000 years old: older than the pyramids at Giza. Once back in Dublin, we made a point of visiting the Kilmainham Gaol, which housed many of the leaders of the 1916 rebellion; the National Museum, home to Ireland’s goldwork hoards and the Iron Age bog bodies; Trinity College and the exquisitely intricate Book of Kells; and had a whirlwind tour of some of the highlights in the Chester Beatty Library. Josh was able to nab some last-minute tickets to the Saturday night show of Bill Bailey’s latest UK tour, which was a blast. And after the only two days of rain we saw on our trip, at 5am on Monday morning the Emerald Isle said goodbye with a glorious sunrise. What a way to see us off!

Rebers in Berlin

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After seven months of only seeing each other via weekly Skype calls, I finally got to see my parents in person – in Berlin! They were here for ten days, and we had such a blast showing them the city that Josh and I now call home. Between arriving at Tegel on the 10th and taking a train to Amsterdam on the 20th, I think they saw just about every major site in Berlin, including some that we haven’t even been to yet ourselves! We took them to Potsdam to see Sanssouci and Schloss Cecilienhof (lunch at the Meierei near Cecilienhof was awesome!); Dad really enjoyed seeing the Chinese Tea House that played host to Josh’s air tea photo on our honeymoon. We went to the Winterfeldtmarkt in Schöneberg, visited the Botanischer Garten (Rebers can’t go to a city without seeing the garden), and spent almost a whole day wandering in and out of the shops, Markthalle, and cafes on Bergmannstraße. I was even able to direct mom to a wool shop and dad to a wine shop across the street from each other near our old sublet: a confluence of perfection for each of them, I think! I was truly delighted when mom told me, “I can see why you like it so much here, and I think we’ll have to come back!” Mission to get parents to fall in love with Deutschland: accomplished.

**Quick note from Josh: You’ve probably noticed that the site looks a bit different. I took some time a few months ago to do a bit of redesign and overhaul of the code. You should notice things load a bit faster and cleaner, plus we love the thumbnails as stamps and the infinite scrolling (scroll down on the main page and try it!). Enjoy!**

Catalunya is not Spain!

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A couple weeks ago we decided to quit the negative-fifteen-degree frigidity of Berlin for sunny, significantly warmer Barcelona! Barcelona is in the northeast of Spain – an area known as Catalunya (Catalonia) – and the Catalunyans have a fierce pride for their region (the title of this post is a popular refrain throughout Catalunya).
We took a walking tour through the old (read: really old) city and Jewish Quarter, and visited the Barcelona History Museum, the highlight of which is an extensive Roman ruin excavation well below street-level, including textile dyeing rooms, public baths, a wine factory, and a fishery. A second walking tour took us through the Barcelona of Gaudí: Palau Güell, Casa Batlló, Casa Milà, the Sagrada Familia (the gigantic cathedral that Gaudí started in 1883 when he was 31, and won’t be complete for at least another 25 years), and sprawling, terraced Park Güell. We took a day to visit Montserrat, a multi-peaked mountain an hour north of the city: home to a Benedictine monastery and hiking trails that wind around the peaks to various shrines, chapels, hermitages, and breathtaking views. On our last two days, Barcelona celebrated the feast day of Saint Eulalia, with light shows throughout the city at night, parades of Gigantes (massive, hollow costumed figures with papier maché heads), and contests for the best-executed castell, a human tower traditional to Catalan festivals. Topped off with an FC Barcelona/Valencia CF football game at a local bar and amazing tapas and wine, this was a much-needed break from dreary midwinter!