Wedding Pictures!

We finally got all our wedding pics from the photographer today! I am still going through them (there are a LOT), but an early favorite is me with my mom in the sweater she eloped in:

Sweater at its second wedding

Sweater at its first wedding

Boldly Go

This week I had to go to the Philadelphia social security office to officially change my last name. I was expecting a DMV-esque pit of government bureaucracy and human despair, but I was not expecting George Takei.

That's right, George Takei and Patty Duke have teamed up to encourage seniors to boldly go to socialsecurity.gov and conquer the final frontier: the internet. There was actually a giant poster of them in the office that I wish I got a picture of, but I didn't have my camera with me so these handouts will have to suffice. Don't be too disappointed, though, you can still watch a bunch of sweet PSAs they made by boldly going to the social security website.

Guest Blog

Guess what? I am so cool I got to write a guest blog post for the national Girl Scout blog! (TFA has a new partnership with the Girl Scouts, so they asked for staff who are GS alums to volunteer). I'm famous!

Honeymoon Part 3: Budapest

In Budapest, we were once again staying near a Christmas market at the foot of a beautiful old building. This time it was St. Stephen's Basilica:

Right next to the entrance of the building where we were staying, there was a marzipan vendor, which was perfect because I flipping LOVE marzipan, and this guy had giant balls of it dipped in chocolate with various jam fillings. That was my favorite thing I ate on the whole trip.

The Budapest Christmas market also had the biggest piles of meat of anywhere we had seen:

MEAT

MORE MEAT

It also had these amazing hot cheese sandwich things - they would spread dough out very thin on a griddle, then pile a TON of cheese and sour cream into it, then flip it over a few times and hand it to you. DELICIOUS.

This is the face of pure happiness.

Besides eating, we also visited the Great Synagogue, which is the biggest synagogue in Europe.

It is really beautiful.

Like in Prague, it also had a somewhat questionably-title information kiosk:

JEWINFORM

We visited the Buda castle, which is near the gorgeous Matthias Church. In addition to being beautiful, it also prompted me and Ben to have a long conversation about Redwall, because of its name.

The church is surrounded by the Fisherman's Bastion, named after the fishermen who used to live there and defend the castle. It is also pretty fairytale-like.

Me on the bastion

Me and Ben on the Bastion, with the city behind us

I think the most impressive building we saw in Budapest is the Parliament Building, which has 365 towers (one for each day of the year) and 40 kg of gold leaf on the inside. It opened in 1896, in honor of the ONE THOUSAND YEAR ANNIVERSARY of the founding of Hungary. Geeze.

Daytime

Nighttime

That second picture was taken on a night cruise of the Danube that we went on, because we are very cool.

It also gave us a great view of the castle:

The last, and best, thing we did in Budapest was go to a thermal bath. It was amazing - you have to run through the freezing cold in your swimsuit to get to the water, but then you get in and it is so hot it is steaming, and you feel like you are in heaven. Plus, the whole thing is in a giant, gorgeous old building.

Ben was there!

So was I!

The next day we went home, and now we are back to regular life (or will be come January, when we go back to work).

Honeymoon Part 2a: Vienna Clock Museum

That's right, CLOCK MUSEUM!!! One of the many amazing things was that a lot of the clocks have been maintained and are still functioning, so every hour a bunch of them go off at once and it is glorious.

LOOK AT ALL THESE AWESOME OLD CLOCKS!!

 The oldest clock in the museum was from the 14th century, and it looks awesome:

Whole thing

Close up

The biggest was the old mechanism from the clock at St. Stephen's (the big old cathedral we saw) in the 1600s:

This is a canopy clock, you would attach it to the poster of your canopy bed, and then you could read it while lying on your back and looking up:

These are really pretty old clocks:

This is an old Japanese sliding clock. The deal is that there were always there same number of hours of day and night, even when day/night were different lengths - so "one hour" of the day during the summer was much longer than "one hour" during the winter. The sliding mechanism allows you to adjust the hour length accordingly:

 These are more awesome old clocks:
A lot of the clocks had astronomical/astrological components to them as well, so they told you not just the time but also things about the solar system:

Astronomical clock...	...closeup of its face
Another astronomical clock...	...and its face as well

There were lots of beautiful grandfather clocks:

Clocks that are part of paintings:

Can you find the clock?

How about this one?

Some extraordinarily elaborate cuckoo clocks from the Black Forest:

There was one crazy old clockmaker's attempt to make a clock that told the date/time according to pretty much every calendar/time-telling system in existence:

This cabinet is taller than me

Closeup of all the faces

Super closeup of one face

Some of the clocks were like elaborate artworks:

My favorites were the ones where you could see all the tiny little gears
Technology is definitely the closest thing Muggles have to magic.

Honeymoon Part 2: Vienna

The first thing that greeted us in Vienna was this awesomely-translated metro ticket machine:

"OK, I buy the ticket"

The public transit system in Vienna was seriously amazing, it goes all over the city, is so clean, and - best of all - runs on schedule! Every stop has a digital sign displaying exactly how long until the next train, and the trains actually come when they are supposed to. It is a miracle of science.

The second thing that greeted us in Vienna was Stephansplatz, home to St. Stephan's cathedral, which has been a church since 1147. Dang, Europe is old.

Then we went to the clock museum, but it was so wonderful and full of so many clocks I am going to write a separate post about it later.

Like in Prague, we were also located near a Christmas market in front of a fairytale-like building, although this time it wasn't a church, but the Vienna city hall:

Who would have thought something named "Rathaus" would be so beautiful?

We went to the Belvedere palace, which is now a museum, and saw Gustav Klimt's The Kiss, which was bigger and more golden than I had imagined.

No pictures inside the museum, so here we are outside of it.

We also learned that the name for Woody Allen's genre is pretty much the same in every language:

"Sex-Komödie"

Other things we did in Vienna but didn't take pictures of:

• Saw the Viennese version of the Stata Center, aka the Hundertwasserhaus
• Ate a lot of sachertorte in various coffee houses, including one that was apparently Freud's favorite
• Saw "The Hobbit" (before you judge us too harshly, it was cold and raining and we were exhausted)
• Laughed every time we saw the word "Wiener," which - being German for "Viennese" - was a lot

Basically, Vienna was like a really beautiful Germany, with really delicious food.