Part 2

So the semester has finished, the family has left, and part 2 has begun. What is part 2? It´s great, it´s relaxing, and it is still abroad, just totally different. I have moved out of Pod Karlovem 12, my beloved and cozy little flat for the past 4 months, and into my backpack. Of course there was the small intermission in which I lived in real nice hotels with the family, but that has disappeared too. So the executive summary (since the last post) first:
School ended, we partied a lot, I moved out. Ari and Sam have had fun in Prague, the family enjoyed touring us around, we had Chinese food on Christmas, then we went to Budapest then to Krakow. On the Warsaw-Krakow leg of the flight, Sam got really sick and needed oxygen at 10000m. We think he is OK, and a real, Western doctor diagnosed him with the same thing as the cooky, Polish doctor: stress (post-plane reaction). The Polish guy´s diagnosis did include all of the following: you are weak, will not have a good life, you are fragile, you are feminine, you have thin skin. Nowhere above did I include Sam´s story because he didn´t care for it. But when did we get the western doctor´s similar opinion? In Brussels, which comes now.
After a lovely evening at Babylon for the New Years, the fam departed for home, soon to be followed by our departure for Brussels. The SkyEurope flight was great, and we had 36 hours to do every touristy thing possible (and yes we did). We had waffles 4 times (and although the marginal returns diminished, when chocolate was added, the new good was far superior to even the first of the waffles), saw the mannequin pisse (who is absolutely hilarious because he is less than a foot tall and nobody realizes that beforehand), saw a protest outside of the EU buildings (Iranians PROTESTING Ahmadinajed), went through a museum (of military history which was massive and absolutely sick), and went to Cafe Delirium (world record holding bar for most beers: 2004. we tried about 20 of them). It was real fun, and we got up at 5am for our 9am flight out of Charleroi (the Bronx of Belgium as Guerric says) which is like 2 hours away. Little did Ari and Sam know how amazing RyanAir is.
RyanAir gives away free tickets. They charge you 5 euros a person to book online (and you can´t book in person or over the phone). They charge you 10 euros online to check a bag. The seats are tiny, the lines are long, there is mad chaos, and there is first come first serve seating. If you´re bag doesn´t fit in the box (and they check every bag), you must pay 20 euros to check it. Overall, they suck. The only thing worse is the Charleroi airport. For our flight, I thought there was tinted windows because it was so cloudy out. Visibility had been reduced to under 100m, so all flights were cancelled. Sam ran to the ticket office, was first in line, and was removed by security for being a security threat. 10 minutes later, the man said "I just didn´t know why you were standing here, but everything is good. You may get back in line¨ Since there were 6 flights cancelled, in those 10 minutes, Sam became number 750 in line. It might have been possible for Sam to have stayed in line during this ´security check,´ we aren´t really sure, but since Sam fell in love with the most beautiful Spanish girl that we had ever seen (the we includes Pierre), he waited next to the line not realizing he wasn´t in the line. Unlike everyone else, we had no plans; we decided to get our rebate online and just rebook. Outside, waiting for the hour bus back to Brussels, Sam met Pierre (in case you were confused from the previous sentence), an awesome Belgian who invited us to stay with his family.
Pierre´s family is some of the nicest people ever. Because we spent almost 3 days with them, there is too much to type about it and I am going to request that Ari not post about our lovely RyanAir experiences and just focus on our time with the Silverbergs, primarily their youngest son Guerric, a 20 year old who skipped high school to go to culinary school and cooked and took us around for 2 days once Pierre left for Barcelona (to read about our time with them, here is a link to ari´s blog: www.lifewithari.blogspot.com ). In short, they cooked unbelievably for us, bought us chocolates to bring home, took us out to see the city, took us to Belgian, nontouristy bars, took Sam to a doctor on a Sunday, took Sam to get blood tests on a Monday at 9am, rearranged their house and computer to turn it into a home entertainment system to watch the Big Lebowsky with us (they love it and Sam and Ari hadn´t seen it), and are just awesome.
So we left last night, went to Charleroi, stayed at a Formula1 hotel (which makes best western seem like a hilton), and woke up at 7 for our flight over here. We re-experienced the horrific airport, the horrific airlines, and the horrific people who don´t wait in the pre-formed line, don´t wait until the fasten seatbelt sign is off before they de-board, and don´t have any regard for other people. But you never know; not only were we some of those people, but Pierre was too.