Island in the Fog

One of the most exciting things about going to Óbudai island when it is not ’THE’ island is stop in your tracks, intently stare down some bushes and ferns, and over-excitedly go ’oh, this is the Colosseum!’. You might even shriek a little to accompany your discovery, thus scaring stiff the occasional random dog or squirrel roaming about with no care in the world. (Before your appearance, that is.)

This Saturday the excitement was doubled, as the fog was so thick, that a) you saw no shrubs and trees until you nearly bumped into them and b) any shrub/tree could have been any venue after a while. The contrast between the festival ready main stage area and it’s ’everyday” counterpart reached tantalizing heights, with everything being pretty much one continuous mass of milky white mist. With a dog in it, most likely, a dog you could not see, only hear the pitter-patter of its tiny paws bringing the possibility of an invisible drool assault ever closer.

As a result of this we wandered off to the beach in something of a daze- Alice in Wonderland feeling reloaded, with the end result being an arrival to what could have very well been the surface of Mars when it still had water.The Danube is so low these days you can wade in to what in more plentiful days is almost the middle of the river, and listen to the ghastly calls of crows and seagulls (yes, I am being over-polite here, their noises sounded decidedly more sinister than a call) and get slightly surprised when a tugboat dignifiedly emerges from the fog. For some reason this actually felt like a perfect setting for a Jamie XX song, so here, a first name on my wishlist for next summer. 

Given this special foggy day, and the accomplishment of having made it to the island at what is a horrifically early hour even on a weekday, but more particularly so on a Saturday, we took a truckload of shots, almost as if we'd been out on normal Sziget duty. Come to think of it, we might never have been on the island quite at this impossible hour- yes, we are of the weak minded sort who go home to have a relaxing night's sleep away from the madness. There's that one time though when our friend was disassembling his Mazda in the parking lot after a Manu Chao concert, and that might have been at dawn. But more of that in a 'what happens on Sziget most definitely does not stay on Sziget' post, let's stick to some intensive visual coverage of the island in the fog.