My Puzzle and The Awards

I don't know when it started. Four and a half months is an easy way to label the time that has passed, but the experience, from the day I decided to take a year off, to the day I called Sam who was on his way to a lacrosse state semi final game and asked him out of the blue if he wanted to travel the world with me to which he replied yes, to the day we arrived in Hanoi and realized that that day had finally come, to the day that I end my trip in my Casablanca hotel room listening to the songs of Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and others who provided us with the background music to our trip. What I can't listen to in this hotel room, but I hear, is all the other sounds from the last four and a half months, the motobikes honking at rush hour in Vietnam, the rivers flowing through Annapurna at 3500m in Nepal, the music blaring at 7am at a club in Barcelona. And that's just what I hear. I still have the tastes of hot Belgian waffels, or the smell of flesh burning through thick smog on a sticky Varanasi morning.
But back to where it started. I often think back to that afternoon in Hanoi, when we got out the airport van and entered the world. An overpacked and clumsy bag on my back, Lonely Planet guide book with Hanoi city map marked in one hand, hostel world reservation sheet in the other, still clean and recently washed clothes on my body, and a nervous anticipation of what's next wringing tightly in my stomach. Well, what was next was me slamming my head on a near by store's overhang engineered for Vietnamese people, rather than 6'3 Westerners. And what was next agter that was the first time of hundreds in which I was asked to buy pirated books, marijuana, or opium. And what was next was the last four and a half months of my life, in which I have travelled thousands of miles and seen thousands of new things, and I'm trying to figure out what all this has done to me.
I know I've changed a lot since that day in October. My bag is much lighter, and filled with mostly things I've picked up along the way. Lonely Planet is long gone and now considered sort of cheating the way. Hostel World reservations, only on New Year's Day in Brussels. My clothes, completely different, yet probably smell like a conglomerate of third world countries, alcohol, and ass. And that wringing thing in my stomach, gone (albeit ghiardia is now here!), and replaced by a pure and open state of excitement, tolerance, and an eagerness to absorb. In the first couple weeks, I noticed a lot of little changes. I would go an entire day without yesterday, tonight, or tomorrow even crossing my mind. I would get lost, or spend hours wandering around, and not care at all. I wasn't sleeping long hours at night, but never once worried about it, or felt tired the day after. And in these first couple weeks, I was thinking about how I was changing, cognitvely recognizing these little things, and appreciating them. I was very introspective in my thoughts, and I was writing a lot. And, I was still comparing aspects of traveling to my life back home. But as time passed, I stopped noticing the changes, the differences, and started to just be the change and the difference. Long train rides filled with reflection were replaced by the weekly Economist or books that I started to fly through. I stopped looking at the world through the eyes of 18 year old Ari Rubin, and started to see it through the eyes of Santiago from the Alchemist, through the eyes of an 18 year old Nepalese Sherpa who will do the same thing and eat the same thing every day for the rest of his life, or through the eyes of a homeless man on the streets of Prague, who stares at an empy hat curled up in a cat's pose on the freezing cold cobblestone, praying that a coin will enter his world, and hoping that later he'll have something to eat or warming to drink. Even seeing the world in this way, I don't know what this whole experience has done to me. I sat down last week and made a long list of lessons that I've learned traveling, complete with concrete examples, but still, I'm not quite sure how these lessons will fit into my life. I now have all those experiences, and memories, and mind things, and ideas, that will somehow change me. It's like I've gone around the world collecting these puzzle pieces, and I have the rest of my life to put them together. And hopefully, this puzzle is just one more piece of the bigger puzzle. I have my Highland Park puzzle, my soccer puzzle, my camp puzzle, my Israel puzzle, my NOLS puzzle, and many others. And putting these puzzles together, that's life.
I want to thank everyone who has helped me find a puzzle piece in the last four and a half months. I've travelled with and met so many great and funny and cool and brilliant people, and formed what I know will be lifelong friendships (thanks facebook!). And that's just the people I stay in touch with. There have been so many others, like Baba the chai drinking, jaras smoking, legless legend of Pushkar who postulated to me his philosophy on life, while sipping chai of course. Or like Dong, the Vietnamese waitress who would never even think about participating in any act of capitalism for fear of greed and breaking tradition. Or like the Cambodian tuk tuk driver, who after schooling me on the soccer pitch, explained to me how bad he wanted some form of government, even though only 30 years ago it was the government that killed his brothers, sisters and grandparents. It is these people, those whom I have left but not forgotten, who provided me with so many subtle acts of kindness and showed me so many beautiful things about life. So thanks to all my new friends. And then there's Sam, my heterosexual lifemate, who over the last four months I learned so much from, especially how to live siesta style. And my brother, the real bro, with whom I got to spend so much time with, and learned so much from, just like it was back in the day when we were the little ones running around, playing and fighting, but more so loving.
The day is finally here, and while I used to think it would feel like a marathon breaking through the ribbon at the finish line, it sort of just feels like every other mile. It's probably because I've realized this isn't the end, just another piece in the puzzle of life.










And also, here's my personal award ceremony:
Keep in mind that I visited 11 countries, and disqualified Thailand because I only saw Khao San Road, and Poland because I only saw Auschwitz.

Best Food
1. India (has variety over...)
2. Morocco
3. Cambodia

Worst Food
1. Spain (tapas is cool when it's cheap or free)
2. Czech Republic

Nicest People
1. Nepal
2. Cambodia
3. India

Not Nicest People
1. Czech Republic
2. Most Europeans
3. India


Laziest People
1. Spain (14%), India (Shops open at 10), Cambodia, Morocco (in the mountain regions where all they do is smoke)

Most Beautiful Sights
1. Taj Mahal
2. Annapurna
3. Canary Island beaches

Most Chilled Out Cities
1. Chefchouen (tourists and local inhabitants just smoke all day)
2. Pushkar (tourists just smoke all day)
3. Pokhara (the best of the 3)

Worst Cities(not reflecting my experience there, just the city itself)
1. Phnom Penh
2. Granada (would be number 1, but Al Hambra is pretty sweet)
3. Gorakhpur (it's not really a tourist city so doesn't take the 1 spot, but really, I would rather go almost anywhere than Gorakhpur)

Craziest Countries
1. India
2. Vietnam (crossing the street)
3. Nepal (a toned down India)

Easiest Travelling
1. Vietnam
2. Cambodia
3. Czech Republic (staying at the Intercon with my parents and having everything paid for was pretty easy)

Dirtiest
1. India
2. Nepal
3. Belgium (really just Brussels, which happens to be the capital of the EU. hmmmm)

Hostels
1. Hanoi Backpacker's Hostel
2. Sant Jordi Arago, Barcelona
3. The Milkman, Pushkar

Bars
1. Delirium Cafe, Brussels (2004 types of beer! come on!)
2. Same Same But Different Treats Cafe, Hoi An
3. Go 2, Ho Chi Minh City

Best Israeli Food
1. Chabad House, Kathmandu
2. Shanti Hotel, Varanasi
3. 1st Laffa Stand, Pushkar

Best Sweet Thing
1. Belgian waffles
2. Gulab Jamun
3. Hello to the Queen "Shalom le Malkah"

Most Marijuana Smoking
1. Morocco
2. India
3. Nepal

And now, for the acceptance speech...