Zeehandellampoons's European Vacation

Just as Mallory and Molly were leaving, my mom, dad and sister were all en route to Barcelona for a week of European family fun. Air travel nightmares notwithstanding, we were all united by Monday and had three days to spend in Barcelona.

Although I was anxious to show them my life here in Barcelona, we spent our first day on a wine tour outside of the city in a village about an hour away. Charles, the director of my program, also happens to run a day-trip company, and was our guide for the day. The tour was really interesting, and we learned all about corking cava (Catalan champagne). The key to bottling the cava is maintaining the bottle inverted with the temporary cap, and then very quickly popping the cap (causing a familiar explosion) and stopping the liquid from escaping with a finger. This process removes the yeast (nicknamed "la madre" or "mother"), and along with it almost a full glass's worth of cava escapes within the first second. We all were relatively successful at not losing too much, although my mom accidentally righted the bottle before letting out the mother and mixed it back in, requiring another two weeks of inversion to let it settle out. Also, interestingly, those mushroom-shaped champagne corks actually begin their lives as perfect cylinders. Crazy.

The next few days consisted of my doing my best to show them the city's finest, including purchasing a new wardrobe at the giant Zara (one of three on the same street), seeing the entire city from the beautiful vista of MontJuic, and having lunch at a sidewalk bar-restaurant consisting of bocadillos with tortilla de patata. They also took a Jewish tour of the city on Wednesday while I was in class, which was apparently pretty interesting. I didn't know the city even had Jews.

Prague, however, had lots of Jews. Jews that lived there pre-WWII, and Jews from Long Island, NY, that flock there for beautiful May weekends. We flew as a family to Prague on Thursday to make the week in Europe a little more interesting (and thanks to 30Eur tickets from Clickair). It was interesting to compare weekend getaways with the family to those with friends, since rather than staying in a hostel we had a nice hotel, and rather than eating food from street vendors we ate at nice restaurants.

Prague itself was packed with tourists. We toured the castle, the old town square, and did a little exploring around the old city, but pretty much the only Czech people that I saw were in some way related to the tourism industry. One interesting moment, however, was when we happened upon a demonstration in Old Town Square by the emergency services department. They were simulating a rescue from a wrecked car, and ended up using the jaws of life to take the car completely apart.

The Jewish history of Prague is fascinating. They alternated falling into and out of favor with the ruling authorities, but for the most part maintained a thriving community for hundreds of years. One of the largest communities of pre-war Europe, the Jewish quarter now contains a multi-building museum of four synagogues and a large (12,000 grave) cemetery. Due to space shortages, successive generations buried their dead in new layers above previous layers, replacing all tombstones on top of the new layer. The result is extremely densely packed head stones, by the thousands. One of the synagogues was converted to a Holocaust memorial, and had the names, towns, birth dates, and yartzheits of all of the Czech Republic's Jewish community that perished in the war. It also contained a moving exhibition of the artwork from children in the Terezin ghetto.

We spent a full day visiting Terezin, about an hour outside of Prague. Unlike the average concentration camp, this ghetto was used as a means of propaganda by the Nazis, and looked more like a small town than a camp. The one time the Red Cross actually visited it, they spent two hours in a jeep, didn't acutally walk into any buildings, and two more hours having lunch. Needless to say thousands died in the camp (more from disease and undernourishment than murder), although most were deported to Auschwitz and murdered there.

Eating in Prague was delicious, thanks to being with my family. Apparently duck and lamb are the Czech delicacies, and the duck especially was excellent. The cheapest pint of beer I found was around $1, and the underground bars were more or less as I had heard. Despite repeated attempts, no one on CouchSurfing was able to meet up with me and my sister, so I didn't meet any locals, although in a city like Prague there are probably too many requests for the few interested locals.