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.