It´s been so long! Ahh!

I guess my lack of blogging recently is just a manifestation of a bigger trend in my lifestyle of the last couple weeks- me being really lazy. I am in no way intending to imply that traveling through India is such "hard work," but honestly, when I arrived in Prague, and had the luxuries of my brother´s apartment and Western fast food such as McDonalds and KFC, I just became really, really lazy. We stayed a couple days in Prague before my parents and sister arrived, sleeping late (something we had never done before being with Matt), drinking A LOT, and sitting in front of the tv watching MTV dance. So that was laziness level 1, but then when my parents arrived, laziness level 2 hit. There´s something about having two people who really love you and care about you that just makes you want to let them do everything for you- and that´s what we did. We woke up when we were told to, went touring when we were told to, ate when we were told to, even showered when we were told to (which was quite frequently due to our recent month long stay in India); the lack of decision-making we needed to do was awesome. But now mom and dad are gone, and it´s Matt, Sam and I in Barcelona. So since I´ve got a lot to catch up on, here´s a brief summary of where we´ve been and what we did.
We spent a couple days with the parents in Prague, doing Jewish touring and eating really amazing food. Prague in late December is freezing, but also beautiful- the several christmas markets spread throughout town are a center for Czech and tourist life, they sell fresh and delicious sugary doughy things and crepes, hot wine and mead, and grill massive pork legs and sausages. And there´s lights, and music, and jollyness...and if I wasn´t Jewish this would be enough to turn me Christian. So Prague was great.
We moved on to Budapest where we had 2 days of non stop touring. One day was spent doing the Jewish tour, and the other day spent doing the Budapest tour. We did manage to squeeze in a few hours to go to what is a Budapest institution, the hot baths. There, we bathed in a massive complex of various types of mineral baths and hot pools. We had a great time at the baths, however, I was a little turned off by the amount of fat and old Hungarians I was swimming with. I remembered that less than a week before I stood on a hot train in Mumbai, with no room to put my arms or left foot, being constantly groped and fondled by a wide variety of individuals, and decided that I´d take the Budapest baths any day.
After a day and a half in Budapest we moved on to Krakow. Krakow is really depressing, especially in the winter, especially when you spend your only day there visiting Auschwitz and Birkenau. I don´t really think that this rushed and not very thoughtful blog post is the appropriate place for my reflections on that, so I´ll leave it there. The one thing I will say is that if you don´t remember much about the Holocaust, or if you´re not very compassionate to what went on, then fuck you.
After our day at Auschwitz, our mute and useless tourguide drove us to what is today the Czech-Polish border, to the town where my grandmother grew up. Using pictures and small bits of information that have somehow survived the last 70 years, we managed to locate the exact apartment where my grandmother grew up, and the electronics store that my great-grandfather had owned before he left Czechslovakia. I felt very proud standing outside of these two locations and taking photographs of two generations of family that have survived since the Holocaust, not as much proud of me or my parents, but of my grandmother and other ancestors who survived the Holocaust. And, I felt a big (pardon my french again) fuck you to anyone in the world let everything that happend happen. I promise I have more sophisticated and reflective thoughts than these brief and explitive filled sentences on this subject, but as I said, not the place.
So we returned to Prague for the last several days of our time with the whole family (and Sam). We continued to eat really amazing food, and then brought in the new year with great spirits and lots of drunkeness. It was great to spend some time with the family in an environment where alcohol consumption for young people is not only permitted but encouraged, and thanks to the new digital video camera my parents bought, there are some new Rubin family home videos to hit the archives (if you ever want to watch, don´t forget to ask about the chugging contest!). So Prague was great, and we left Jan 1 for Brussels.
Brussels is a cool place. The waffles are nothing like what you may have heard. They are 100 times better. These things, wow, they just melt in your mouth, and leave you saying (or at least left me saying, much to the annoyance of Matt and Sam) wow for several minutes, until you get another one. Belgian chocolate is also obviously tasty, but very expensive. And then...there´s Belgian fries eaten with mayonaise. When 9/11 happened and we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and temporarily hated the French and changed the name of "french" fries to "freedom" fries, we as a society made a huge mistake. We should have taken that golden opportunity to pay tribute to the real creators of these fried goodness, the Belgians. There are no fries in France, it´s just that France is so much more famous then Belgium. But the fries in Belgium...also a wow inducer. Even with the mayonaise. There´s a great scene in Pulp fiction, and if you´ve seen it, that´s how I felt about eating french fries with mayo until I ate it in Brussels. Its great! (but I still won´t do it back home). After a few days in Brussels, it was time to catch a flight to Barcelona to see an FC Barcelona match at the Camp Nou, something I´ve been looking forward to doing for the last year. Seriously, I think the only reason I was going to Barcelona was to see this game. But we bought tickets on the worst airlines in the world, Ryan Air (really the worst airlines in the world), and the weather was bad, so our flight was cancelled.
This was sub-seriously depressing for about 10 minutes. I really was upset. And the scene at the airport was absolute pandomonium, which didn´t help, but then again, shit happens when you travel.
And I guess it worked out for the best, because if that flight hadn´t been cancelled, we wouldn´t have met this dude named Pierre, who let us stay at his house for the next three days while we waited for a flight. And during those three days, Pierre´s family, the Silverbergs, introduced me to a new type of kindness and hospitableness which was truly inspirational. The Silverbergs have four boys and a girl, all between the ages of 19 and 27. Their four oldest have all moved out of the house, and so they took us in and treated us like their children. They cooked amazing meals for us, took us around wherever we needed to go, turned their living room into a makeshift movie theatre to watch the Big Lebowski; it was a way different experience from the waffles and fries, but something that will leave me with an even better taste of Brussels. Meeting people like that is one of the most special things about traveling, and it was a few short days I will never forget.
And now we´re in Barcelona, in the nicest hostel I have ever stayed in, right in the heart of Las Ramblas. It´s a bit chilly here, and rainy, but Spain is great and the next and last 6 weeks of my travels are going to be amazing. Cheers everyone, I promise it won´t be as long as it was for a new post! Happy new years