Last week we traveled to western Romania for my cousin’s wedding. He worked in Romania for a number of years, met a Romanian and though they live in Germany now, they had the wedding in her hometown.

We had a great time, despite an incredibly long day getting there (5 hour flight delay!). It was an amazing experience getting to take part in a Romanian wedding celebration, though it required quite a bit of stamina – the ceremony was at 4p, the reception started at 7p and the main course wasn’t served til 2a! The weather was gorgeous, though, and there was plenty of wine and dancing.

It was equally amazing to see and explore an area in eastern Europe not heavily trafficked by tourists. The city we flew into, Timişoara, was the site of the first demonstrations against Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu that quickly led to his overthrow and execution in December 1989. 20+ years later and many signs of the communist, Soviet-style architecture and infrastructure still exist. One of the cities we drove through, Resita, used to be a major iron producing hub (apparently iron for the Eiffel Tower was produced here) and the city is a mixture of high-rise Soviet-style apartment buildings and huge industrial factories, all connected by an elevated track. It looked like something out of a graphic novel.

We took a small road trip the day after the wedding with family, driving into the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains for some amazing views, swimming in a mountain lake and Papanași (Romanian pastry) at an old resort hotel nearby. Our last day in the country we spent wandering (and sweating – 90 degress F!) around Timişoara itself. It’s a very interesting mix of eastern European and old Viennese architecture and ambience. It has several large squares lined with baroque/rococo buildings, and these are surrounded by rather bleak and boring concrete buildings.

All in all a very interesting trip!

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!

We just finished up our first 7 days on The Emerald Isle, and unbelievably we haven’t seen a drop of rain yet. Sadly, we had to say goodbye to our friends JM & Talia – who visited us in Berlin and then traveled with us through Ireland until this morning when they flew back to NY.
We arrived in Dublin on Monday evening, spent the day in the city on Tuesday, then rented a car and made our way south and west starting Wednesday. We stopped at the impressive Powerscourt Gardens and an ancient monastic ‘city’ at Glendalough in the Wicklow Mountains, stayed overnight in Kilkenny (right next to the Smithwick’s brewery!), and then made our way further west to the Dingle Peninsula (with a stop at the Rock of Cashel) on Thursday. We took a leisurely driving tour of the Peninsula on Friday, and spent the evening at a pub listening to ‘trad’ Irish music and getting some travel advice from a very nice (and very drunk) local fisherman. On Saturday we drove up to Galway, with stops at the Loop Head Lighthouse and cliffs (taller than the Cliffs of Moher, and no bus tours!) and The Burren. Meg and I are in Galway and environs for the next two days before we travel to Northern Ireland and then back to Dublin. We’ll send another postcard next week!

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!**

Wow. Though we were in Cologne for Karneval (Carnival/Mardi Gras/Etc) four years ago, we were only in town for a day or two and didn’t really experience much of Kölner Karneval. This year, we took the train down and arrived in the city on Saturday – the height of party time. The city goes absolutely nuts – drinking, singing (and more singing), crazy costumes- generally fighting off the cold and grey any way possible. Karneval time in the Rhineland is a little like Halloween in the States in that people get dressed up and there’s a lot of candy given out (though here it’s at 3-hour long parades where you have sweets thrown at you by old men dressed up as Napoleonic soldiers).

We danced and drank at a Brauhaus Saturday night (in costume, naturally – Meg was a man, I was a woman – don’t ask); Sunday we met up with some old friends for a parade in Sürth, where I grew up (I was a clown, Meg was some sort of rat princess); Monday is “Rosenmontag” (Rose Monday/Shrove Monday) and is the biggest day of German Karneval- we went to the big parade in the nearby town of Bonn, former capital of West Germany (I was burned out, Meg was a tree); Tuesday we actually got to be in a parade- we were part of the last float in a neighborhood parade in the “Südstadt” of Cologne (I was some sort of Elizabethan Viking, Meg was a tree again).

As they say in Kölsch (a dialect spoken only around Cologne) – “Alaaf!“