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!

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!