My daughter in law, Jody is around 21 weeks pregnant.(with my first grandchild) She sent me some sonogram pictures. I am not sure if I can post them. I am pretty sure I can post one though.
It is so wild that you can have pictures of a baby when it is still in the womb. This is not that new a technology (well the 3D is) but I did not have many of these with my pregnancies.
Hi little boy. We love you and cannot wait to meet you in person. July 7th you say? I'll be there.
When
we lived in Tromsø, my husband was flying to another town from Tromsø
with the US Ambassador. I noticed that my husband had not packed his
pajamas. And coincidentally I had just baked a batch of chocolate chip
cookies. I piled the three kids in the car and rushed to the airport
hoping to get there before the plane left. I put the baby in a back
pack, ran to the gate as the plane was still being boarded. I left the
two older kids with the gate agent and asked her to watch them for me. I
ran, breathlessly onto the plane, baby in backpack and paper bag in my
hand. I got on the plane and called out my husband's name. he was very
surprised to see me and the baby on the plane. I handed him the bag
and got off the plane before they closed the door. My husband later
told me that the Ambassador asked my husband what was in the bag. My
husband said "chocolate chip cookies". He didn't tell him that his
pajamas were also in the bag!
Courtney’s Trip to Greece
November 29, 2023
If you're at IAD from 3:42 to 5:30 pm today or
GVA from 7:35 to 10:35 am tomorrow, look me up. I'll be in travel purgatory for roughly the next 20 hours. Now boarding.
-----------------------------------------------------
November 30, 2023
The Geneva airport is weird. After clearing customs you're dumped into a giant mall. I have a three hour layover here, but the departure info sign says I can't find out what gate to go to until an hour and a half before liftoff. I guess I'm supposed to hang out in the mall until then. A non-zero portion of the Americans changing planes here seem to think they are in France. Airport employees all seem to be very slender, polite, efficient and dressed in red. The airport website has an FAQ page that includes the rules around transporting fondue and fondue supplies.
My flight from IAD was half empty and comfortable, the airline fed us well, but I did not sleep enough. I feel OK for now, but the bags under my eyes tell a different story. If I can stay awake until 7 pm after I land in Athens and make my way to my lodging, I'll call that a success. I keep wanting to say that this is hard because I'm in my 40s, but I had a hard time sleeping enough traveling to Australia when I was 17, and I was so exhausted when I got to London at age 19 that I fell asleep at the British Museum while waiting for check-in to start at the hotel I'd booked. So maybe this is just hard because humans didn't evolve for this kind of wild time-traveling globe-spanning magic. Maybe magic is supposed to be awful even when it's also wonderful.
Here, have a few pictures: my airplane dinner (cheese ravioli, bulgar salad, and pressurized yogurt that sprayed white dairy on my face and clothes), my airplane breakfast (cheese, egg and onion), and my very tired face.
11/30/23
Athens, the first few hours!
In photos and a short video:
1. I fell asleep on a plane flying over cloudy Italy, woke up over sunny Greece.
2./3. Took the Metro from the airport to the city; was serenaded by accordion players en route.
4. When the Metro stop my hostel is at was excavated, some very old stuff was uncovered. Now commuters and tourists can check it out.
5. I’m making friends with the locals.
6. The view from my hostel.
7. A street scene as the sun sets.
8. A very kitschy Christmas themed … something.
9. Cheese pie and cappuccino for dinner. (Theme of Day 1: Don’t succumb to jet lag!)
10. The Acropolis as seen a few blocks from where I’m lodging.
Non-visual observations:
1. I appreciate how Greek people on the Metro seem to navigate crowds. A lot of attention to those around them, polite nods and eye contact, minimal jostling, respect for personal space, and situational awareness.
2. I will never pass for a local woman because I do not have eyebrow game. I’m perfectly content to have thin and unsculpted brows, myself. If any Greek women feel the same way, I have not seen them yet.
3. There are people huddled in dark piss-scented alleys smoking who-knows-what off aluminum foil sheets here, too. It’s not just a Portland thing. Fewer of them are visible in the Athens neighborhood where I’m staying than on the downtown Portland bus mall after dark, sure. But they are here.
December 1, 2023
At the start of the 20th century, these ladies - 2,300 years old at the time - still had their faces. It took just a few decades of industrial air pollution and acid rain to wash away what the millennia until then had preserved.
When I travel solo, I go in search of emotional connections to our shared humanity. I go looking for epiphanies and moments of beauty. But I can’t reliably guarantee the specific insights that I think I’m looking for.
Today I spent a lot of time roaming Athens on foot. I visited the Acropolis. I saw these women - the Caryatids - and learned about their marble fate. And I did so on an unseasonably warm Greek day when several other tourists spoke to me in pitying tones when they learned that I’m American. Apparently Americans aren’t just mocked as oafish tourists in the abstract and treated as exceptions to that rule in person any more; many of us are actively disliked for whatever ugliness the eye of the beholder chooses to see. Apparently Greece, like the rest of the world, is getting warmer. It was beautiful today.
I’m still sorting through the surge of emotions I felt when I learned that the world we created did more to destroy these marble figures over less than a hundred years than the millennia of war and pillaging that defined the high hill in an Ancient Greek city.
Is this always what it feels like when you realize you’ve lived through a moment that the world is now eroding fast? America seems to be in decline. The climate that has nurtured humanity is unraveling. Will everything fall apart as fast for us as it did for the Caryatids? And is it ok that I find hope entwined with the despair that that question brings?
These statues are damaged forever, but they also have been saved. The marble women I viewed in Athens today are stone mimics, not originals; their older sisters are now preserved in museums, protected from airborne decay. And if the originals were returned back to their hilltop home, they’d gaze out on clearer skies than the ones that they last saw. Athens has cleared the stagnant air. Environmental protections changed the course of that piece of the city’s history.
I don’t expect the trend of warming weather, also born of industrialization, to reverse itself as cleanly as so many areas of the planet have managed to clean their dirty skies. And that’s where I have to look to other lessons from history to find hope. Athens has had Golden Ages before, and then eras of collapse. It’s gone from everything to nothing to many things to very little to a lot. Losing what we have - as a planet, as a country, maybe even as individual human beings - is terrifying. But in some way it’s also inevitable. The only way to avoid the aches and challenges of old age is to die young, as I try to remind myself every time I lament the rapid disappearance of my youth. I prefer the aches to the alternative.
The Caryatids were beautiful for an almost unimaginable period of time. And then the very air around them changed and the beauty of their faces went away.
The Acropolis is, in some ways, a monument to this kind of loss: so much of what was once there has been destroyed by war, looted by opportunists, damaged by negligence. And before the marble of today’s Acropolis rose some 2,400 years ago, the people of ancient Athens stood on that craggy hill and reckoned with another, earlier, history, of even older monuments that had been looted or abandoned before their civilization was born.
I am rambling and I guess I don’t know that I have a coherent point. I’m glad I’m here. I’m sad about the world. And I feel connected to a very long legacy of people who have felt a similar grief, who lived as long as they lived and then - as we all inevitably do - declined and died. And maybe there’s hope hidden inside that sad truth, that even when things fall apart and marble crumbles and stories are forgotten, the end is not the end.
December 2, 2023
Scenes from Athens: Mature themes edition.
Content warning: images and videos in this post depict meat, religion, a cannabis-adjacent business and sexually explicit souvenirs.
Details:
1. Feta, cheeses and meats at a supermarket.
2. These colorful souvenirs must be popular, or they would not be so common.
3. This vegetarian was trying to find an outdoor produce market and was sent the wrong place by Google Maps.
4. Inside a very old Orthodox Church. Not a great photo, but this was my first time actually seeing an icon in person. I don’t think I really understood what the term meant until now.
5. Inside the same very old church.
6. Cannabis is not legal in Athens but there are a lot of head shops here that sell something that, from what i can see looking through the windows, appears green and smokeable. Online reviews lead me to think it’s non-intoxicating hemp flower. That seems odd, but I’m not interested in exploring this aspect of the local culture any further.
December 2, 2023
Scenes from Athens: This place is quirky edition.
1. This store appears to only sell ribbons.
2. Phone booths still exist here.
3. I happened upon the changing of the guards outside the Parliament Building.
4. A small sidewalk karaoke party.
5. A street sign.
6. Army surplus store.
7. I don’t know what this business does, but it appears to have a metal samurai-like robot warrior holding shopping bags in its front window.
8. Shoes.
9. A sign at a construction site.
10. This store appears to only sell fancy rubber ducks.
December 2, 2023
Scenes from Athens: Food edition.
1. The pretzel-like bread these street vendors sell is supposed to be quite good. I haven’t had it yet, but I will.
2. Limes on a tree next to a metro station.
3. This is not a great picture, but this is a pomegranate tree. It was just dropping fruit on a city park like that was its job.
4. I found the produce market after a brief Google Maps error temporarily led me to a hall of animal carcasses.
5. Each of these spice bags is 1 euro - so about $1.10 USD. I bought the blend for feta cheese. The vendor was very insistent that I not use it for anything other than feta.
6. An onion, a bell pepper, two tomatoes, a kilo of mushrooms and a bag of feta spices cost me about $4 USD at the market. The mushrooms alone would have been $7-9 back home in Portland.
7. The olive oil section of a small urban grocery store.
8. Canned food.
9. I took a picture of this because it confused me. I don’t understand what it is.
10. Just an orange tree I walked under while I was out and about.
December 3, 2023
I left Athens this afternoon and arrived in Delphi as the sun was going down.
In Athens, I toured art both new (graffiti in the Psyrri neighborhood, which is known for its street art) and old (artifacts at the National Archaeological Museum). I especially liked the parallel between one contemporary grafitti painting and the ancient mask of Agamemnon.
In Delphi I made a few new feline friends and walked the cobblestones of a picturesque tourist town in its off season. The views are stunning.
In between, the drive was magnificent, though I have no pictures of the switchback roads; the deer, cow and wild boar crossing signs; or tourist-packed ski town of Parnassus. My hands were gripped on the wheel the entire way. This was my first time driving outside the U.S. or British Columbia, and it went OK, but if my itinerary had worked without a car that would have been even better.
It's been a challenging day. An all night techno party outside my hostel robbed me of my sleep last night. I've been eating haphazardly and my body does not approve. I miss Zach.
Hard days are always part of travel, and there will probably be more challenges before I return home. So it goes.
December 3,2023
It had been a couple years since I'd brushed out my hair when it was dry. Lying in bed in my hotel room, I decided tonight would be a good night for that.
December 4, 2023
I find myself feeling today that I am among the most fortunate people to have ever lived: to have the privilege of being born a girl during a rare moment in history when that did not limit my humanity in the eyes of the world; to have been raised by parents who taught me to question my assumptions and think critically about my choices; to have found a career that fills my life with meaning; to have the resources and will to travel and the opportunity to connect with history and people from across time and space as a result; and to have love and support and a home to return to.
I was moved tears at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi today as I reflected on where I am, where I have been and how I got here. Thinking about the impact this place made on my dad when he visited in 1968 with his sister and parents, about the statue in Grandma and Grandpa's living room that I never knew until now was a souvenir from their time in Greece, about the memento my aunt inherited that bears a replica of King Agamemnon's mask.
I don't know. Our lives are so short, and the the world is so big. It's a lot. I'm glad I'm here.
Here are some images and videos from today: ancient sites, a valley and the distant Gulf of Corinth as seen from Delphi, this morning's breakfast, and an afternoon selfie from the patio of my hotel.
December 5, 2023
I am in Olympia, Greece, and doing the things tourists do in Olympia, after a very long drive from Delphi. This place is a ghost town. I guess it's far enough from the population centers that tourists don't come here in the off season. I've developed a sore throat and body aches and am going to try to navigate the Greek medical system tomorrow if I don't feel better when I wake up. Wish me luck.
Pics:
1. Crossing the Gulf of Corinth on one of the world's longest cable-stayed bridges. Now I'm in the Peloponnesian Peninsula!
2. I am the only guest in my hotel here in Olympia. This is the view from my balcony.
3. The streets are empty of foot traffic and most businesses are closed here in the tourist district. It's definitely the off season!
4. I like the derpy looking gryphons on display at the local museum.
5. The site of the ancient Olympics was in ruins for something like 1,500 years before archaeologists started excavating it in the 1800s. The fragmented pediment of the Temple of Zeus has been assembled as well as possible here.
6. Corinthian columns are defined by decorative acanthus leaves. I had an acanthus in my front yard when I bought my house in Portland and I hated it. Zach has been trying to kill it for years and may have finally succeeded. I like this one better.
7. Standing in a field of gigantic collapsed stone columns.
8. Entering the arena where athletes ran long ago.
9. Ancient ruins.
December 6, 2023
On the drive from Olympia to Sparta today I went across a bridge that had been reduced to one lane due to construction. There were no flaggers in orange reflective gear at each end of the bridge, like we’d have in the U.S. Instead, there was an old guy in slightly rumpled pleated tan slacks and a navy jacket peering around in both directions at the midway point and waving at cars with his hands when he deemed it safe for them to proceed.
I was clutching the wheel so I didn’t get photos of that specific scene, but here are images of other ordinary things in Greece that might seem unusual back home.
1. I think this sign means the speed limit is 30 kilometers per hour and passing is not allowed. However I have not yet driven on a road where locals don’t pass me if I’m not going at least 20 kph over the posted limit, so maybe the sign is a suggestion not a mandate.
2. This sign means there’s a sharp curve ahead.
3. I presume this indicates you are entering a no bugles zone.
4-5. There are a ton of boxes like these on roadsides all over the place. Inside are religious icons and sometimes burned candles.
6. It is forbidden to flush toilet paper everywhere I have been in this country. I understand that it’s because the plumbing can’t handle it. I will not miss this part of Greek life when I get home.
7-9. Sparta is the first place I’ve been that seems like a normal place where people live. Athens was overflowing with Brits and Germans flying in on cheap off-season tickets, and Delphi and Olympia were both mostly deserted off-season tourist towns. Here, Greek speaking children leave school together while Greek speaking adults walk on the sidewalk, eat at restaurants or shop in stores. This is what that looks like.
December 6, 2023
One reason I’ve been eating poorly on this trip: I’ve had a lot of anxiety about going to non-tourist-trap restaurants on my own.
I know places that serve a lot of tourists will be able to handle me.
But everywhere else,I feel awkward about not being fluent in the norms of asking to be seated, placing an order, paying my tab. I worry that it’s rude that I only speak English. I don’t know if there will be any vegetarian food I can eat. I feel weird about dining by myself.
Several times I’ve found well-reviewed restaurants online, looked in their windows, seen only men inside, and walked away because that also makes me nervous. Why aren’t there any women there at all?
So I’ve eaten a lot of hearty hotel breakfasts, a lot of lunches of croissants and cheeses I stuffed into my pockets at the breakfast buffet when nobody was looking (I know, I’m terrible!), and a lot of vending machine or grocery store dinners. Yesterday’s dinner was pistachios, popcorn and pudding (I thought I was getting yogurt, not pudding, but I can’t read Greek,heh). Earlier this week it was vending machine candy.
I didn’t want to wake up hungry at 2 am again tonight to finish off a bag of popcorn in my hotel room again tonight, though. I was hungry. There’s a big square surrounded by restaurants a few blocks from my hotel. The first place I approached was yet another whose clientele were only men — what’s up with that? But the second place had couples, families, a good mix. There were menus posted outside in both English and Greek, with vegetarian options listed. So here I am, finally getting a real non-breakfast meal, and listening to the clack-clack of backgammon boards as I chow down. It is nice.
December 7, 2023
It’s apparently a good day for storming castles.
Today I toured Mystras, a fortress community inhabited from the 1200s to the 1800s.
I took a wrong turn on the way there, so instead of entering at the accessible lower gate, I found myself at a rockier higher elevation that my tour book said was not worth the effort for most. Based on the views I found after making my way to the top of the castle, I think I disagree with that assessment - for me, at least.
I also got up close and personal with Byzantine era homes and churches, including paintings at an Aya Sofia that was much more modest than the cathedral of the same name I visited in Istanbul back in 2009.
This was my first dive into the relatively recent Greek history of places that have been built in just the past thousand years.
December 8, 2023
I spent last night in a Byzantine castle - but not the ruin I visited earlier in the day. Monemvasia is a stony island fortress that has become a tourist destination, with updated rooms for rent at lower elevations, and not-updated stone structures looming on the hilltop up above.
To find my room, I had to pass though an unmarked door, go though a finished room, exit to a courtyard, and let myself in to an un-numbered door. I fell asleep exhausted at 7 pm, and then woke up around 10:30 and decided to explore - only to learn that I’d been locked in to the part of the castle where I was staying. The doors were unlocked by the time I woke up this morning, so I got to do a little daylight exploration before heading to my next destination.
Pics/videos:
1. I made a time-lapse video of the route to my room, mostly so I could find it again if I got lost. I counted 14 cats as I walked, though I’m not sure if I captured them all in frame.
2. The minute I stopped making that little video, a visitor appeared on my private patio.
3. Today’s breakfast was astounding. I ate until I was full, and then went back for more.
4. The guests who ate outside had even more fun at breakfast than I did.
5. The sun was blinding this morning.
6-9. Scenes from my hike up to the undeveloped areas of the fortress. I wasn’t feeling great, and getting back down the slick cobblestone switchback trail was a challenge, but I’m glad I made the effort.
10. There’s no vehicle traffic inside the gates of Monemvasia, so construction crews use livestock to transport equipment to work sites.
December 9, 2023
And now my cold has turned into bronchitis. I feel pretty well after I’m up and caffeinated, but lying down to sleep sends me coughing and keeps me up at night. I’m in Greece for 3.5 more days and I’m not sure how best to deal with this. I suspect I’ll still be coughing when I board my flight back home, and I feel bad for the folks who will have to listen to me hack up a lung all the way - especially on the 9+ hour flight across the Atlantic.
December 9, 2023
Today, I rested. I have a pesky respiratory infection and I spent most of the day in my hotel room finishing a book (“The Immortal King Rao”) and surfing the internet. I left my room to go to the supermarket to pick up food, lozenges and medical masks, and wound up wandering the streets of Nafplion for a couple of hours. This is a beautiful scenic port town.
The first two pics are views from my hotel window by day and by night. The rest are scenes from my walk: a horse-drawn carriage, a hilltop fort above my lodging, the bay, an island fort in the bay, cats around town, a scenic street, and the ice cream I had for lunch.
December 10, 2023
I’ve still got this pesky cough but I didn’t want to sit around in my hotel room all day so I stuffed my pockets with lozenges and headed out to two more sites.
I return to Athens tomorrow, and I’d hoped to visit the Jewish Museum and the neighborhood of Exarchia there on my last full day in Greece. But I’m not sure if I’ll be up for a trip into the central city from my hotel near the airport. And I fly out of Greece on Tuesday morning, so my time here will be at an end very soon. That’s ok. I’ve had a great trip, but I’m ready to go home.
Meanwhile, here is a look at some of what I got up to today.
Pics/videos 1-4 are from Mycenae, the capital city of the ancient people who pre-dated the Classical Greeks and dominated this landscape a thousand years before the Acropolis was built. The round structure is the burial site where the Mask of Agamemnon, which I saw in an Athens museum, was found.
Image 5: A tablet with writing in Linear B, the syllabic writing system used by the Mycenaeans.
Pic 6: If I’m going to be out and about while sick, I’m going to wear a mask.
Pics 7-8: Epidavros is home to perhaps the most magnificent theatre of the ancient world, built 2,500 years ago to seat 15,000 people. This venue hosts contemporary performances today, too. The rest of the site is mostly in ruins, but it used to be a kind of ancient health spa, with a hotel, healing center, athletic facilities and religious temples.
Pics 9-10: I sat down to eat a lunch of cappuccino freddo and spinach pie, and was joined by a bunch of new friends.
December 11, 2023
Last day in Greece is going kind of weird. At the address for the hotel I booked for tonight is a fully locked and gated apartment complex with no signs and no marked entryways or obvious doorbells. I tried to shout over the fence at a man doing maintenance on the property and he either ignored me or didn’t hear me, I’m not sure. I got here an hour and a half before check-in, so maybe the gate will be open when the clock strikes 3 pm.
There’s a rocky coastline at the end of the block and I have a book. I guess I’m going to read and listen to the waves crash for a while.
Update: I’m in!
December 12, 2023
I superstitiously didn’t want to say anything about driving in Greece until I’d returned my rental car, but now that that is done: I’m so proud of myself for how I handled navigating unfamiliar roads and a very different driving culture on this vacation!
I spent 14 hours behind the wheel, driving more than 1,000 kilometers, or roughly 650 miles: Athens to Delphi to Olympia, Sparta, Mystras, Monemvasia, Nafplion, Mycenae, Epidavros and back to Athens. I probably doubled the number of lifetime toll gates I’ve passed through and tripled the number of times I’ve passed cars on two-land roads. I was frequently bewildered by the unfamiliar traffic signs and time and time again decided to go with the flow. And somehow it all worked out.
Greece feels like a great country to get practice with driving though chaos: The roads are wild, but the drivers are patient (even when they are in a hurry) and kind.
Now I’m at ATH, checked in two hours early for the first of three flights that will eventually deposit me back home in Portland. I expect to land at PDX in about 22 hours.
I don’t have a lot of photos of my time behind the wheel because it didn’t feel safe to capture them. Here’s a bit of what I do have:
1. Listening to American music on the radio as I pass through a toll gate.
2. When I drove through orange fields I passed lots of people selling citrus on the side of the road.
3. A screen shot of the stunningly beautiful (and terrifying) backroads switchback route I took to Nafplion.
4. Snow-capped peaks somewhere near Olympia.
5. My tired face in the shuttle to the airport after dropping off my rental car. (The car itself cost less than $90 to rent, though I spent another $130-$140 on gas to fuel my journey, and I have no idea how much my tolls will add up to in the end.)
December 13, 2023
Chicago. My flight into the US was delayed by an hour and by the time I cleared customs I was told I’d been rebooked
Courtney
The airline got me a hotel room for last night and meal vouchers at least
Although I only slept about 3 hours
Mom in a chat:
I'm glad you are home and safe
Me too! Zach’s at work, can’t wait to see him when he gets back. He surprised me and got a Christmas tree and set up some decorations while I was gone!
Ermahgawd I missed these guys and I think maybe they missed me too.
