Empty Spaces

So this post’s pretty overdue, since it was early March that we went out into a moderately sunny day and basically shot the two epic tourist magnets of Budapest, the Parliament, and the castle, with the ridiculously eye candy combination of them both.

The Parliament itself is marginally on my daily route, so I do get to walk by it and see it pretty often, and yes, I also see the outer walls of the castle as well from across the Danube, but it dawned on me that I hadn’t actually been within the castle walls in a long time. So I went. And I assumed, since it was off season and there was a chilly wind,  that it might tend towards those degrees of desertion I had witnessed it in back in my early days as a Budapester, when I regularly brought friends over to see it on their first visit to the city.

For some reason the first thing that came into my mind was the Latin ’sic transit gloria mundi’ (The perks of an older-school Romanian education, you’ll be able to throw in some wise old Latin saying for basically anything that happens to you. Either that, or a quote from Seinfeld, but those are more the perks of a wide ranging network of cable television.)

Of course, one can argue that now that there’s a basically non stop flow of people in every nook and cranny of the castle, it’s more popular, better known- these are the glory days, then. It may well be, but I still long for the time when we could walk up to the castle, bring a book and a soda, and sit right next to the Fisherman’s Bastion reading. Living in the space, not just passing through it fleetingly.

It was the thing that struck me most about the shots once I’d collected them- bar for the couple taking a selfie, who then trudged on to the next photo opp, they are empty.  The couple themselves pissed me off a good deal for they were not so skilled with their phone- or she wasn’t so happy with how she looked in any of the pictures- and spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to reach absolutes of city brake scenic-ness.

I therefore assume that I tried, albeit unconsciously, to recapture something of that older Budapest I knew, the one where spaces could be just yours for a while, and yours alone. It wasn’t easy, most pictures had plenty of ruined sisters, with someone scuttling unexpectedly into the frame, and of course it is more than likely that such a Budapest never really existed, it just became such in the way I remember it. And every so often those are the places we’d most want to go back to.

The Budapest Saint Patrick's Day Parade 2016

Going to the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade year after year pretty much means you’ll sooner or later run out of subjects to write about- there’s more people every year- check, the weather is always a tad better than predicted, under the auspices of the proverbial Irish luck- check, it’s amazing how many people turn out to an Irish parade without being necessarily Irish- check,  random people are always taken aback and try to guess what this is all about- check.

The one innovation of the year seemed to be the Guinness selfie stick, which could be chosen as a gift instead of the traditional silly hat- though which one of the items would make you actually look sillier when worn/used is open to debate. While the one innovation that is still missing is a food stand- there’s plenty of stout and whiskey to be had, but a hot dog stand or two would help ensure that people don’t get overly illuminated by the time the crowd reaches Saint Stephen’s. This seems to be the pain point where a lot of people wander off Irish rover style into the wilderness, with the rest marching on towards Instant.

I confess to having passed on the Instant part this year- the plan is always to have some pints of Guinness somewhere else, which somewhere else fittingly happens to be the Irish pub Becketts just around the corner, and then maybe come back later to check out the concerts. The concerts are an interesting bit actually, because some of them are not necessarily Irish, but a sort of often pleasant yet slightly eerie Celtic-Medieval fusion, but I am pretty confident I can revel in them next year as well.

Another commitment for next year (one of those things whiskey is pretty good at making your forget) is to be more colour coordinated. Well, better said, since it's always a tad chilly-windy during the parade, I should get a green coat, as I'm not sure I'm bold enough for an orange one, though my absolutely favourite outfit of this year's parade, which can be admired below, was coordinated around a splendid peach coloured item.

No Music for the Weak Minded

For some reason that has always baffled me, the classic movie ’Some Like It Hot’ was translated as ’Some People Like Jazz’ into Romanian. At the time I first discovered this strange discrepancy in the Matrix, jazz was safely situated in the most distant of galaxies from my tastes, and frankly, it’s still somewhere out in the wilderness.

I occasionally gave it tentative tries, like when it was extensively featured in the screen version of The Talented Mister Ripley, or when a friend convinced me to accompany her to a Brad Mehldau concert or when I discovered U2 songs referencing jazz greats- to this day I can thoroughly enjoy songs that have well tamed jazzy bits, but subject me to an endless jazz impro solo and I will relinquish any responsibility for my deeds.

So it might seem thoroughly out of character that I would go to a concert by Belgian band TaxiWars who play, well, jazz. Yes, true, the reason why they are on my radar at all is that their lead singer happens to coincide with that of dEUS, and I enjoyed most of his other side projects, of which he has plenty.

The first signs of impending danger came during the opening act, Hungarian band Best Bad Trip- I could have spared you the cheap joke of how their name describes their music pretty accurately, but I won’t. Thing is, I can’t even say I disliked their songs, and by all accounts they are superbly trained musicians, but they’re just not the kind of tunes that will keep me concentrated through a concert.

So yes, we chatted and sipped our drinks and kept doing so during TaxiWars, which attracted the slight ire of Tom Barman himself. Truth be said, TaxiWars were more involving for me, at least, since they had a vocal, which definitely helps, and many of their songs seemed to actually begin and end somewhere, with a clearly discernible backbone in between these two points. Yet on the whole, they were also more like background music for when you mix cocktails, which is some sort of compliment, but not one that would justify attending a concert.

Therefore, the one thing I learned, as the Coen Brothers wonderfully put it in Burn After Reading, is not to do it again. Jazz might definitely be someone’s cup of tea, but not mine, and so as to spare any disturbance in the force, I will just stick with dEUS, in which Tom Barman filters his jazz influences and wraps them in enough rock to suit weak minded people like myself.