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 Red Bull Air Race Post

Thought we'd let a bit of time pass before posting the Air Race shots, since it caused so much emotion among the dwellers of the fair city of Budapest. Many went into full blown irate mode cursing everyone from the local authorities to the maker of the known and unknown universes over the (insert vicious expletive here) noise the planes made over the weekend. 

While I'm not going to argue that there wasn't any disturbance in the force, I would not go as far as to say it ruined my life. Since it was a very hot weekend, I had the luck of sleeping with my windows open and it was not the planes to wake me up either during the day or night, but people having loud arguments in the street, screaming their heads off drunk or having their dogs bark themselves into furious oblivion at each other. And these will never go away, whereas the race lasts a weekend, brings people to Budapest and yes there's tiny planes flying under the Chain Bridge. 

So there, we quite enjoyed it, in spite of the (insert vicious expletive here) noise, the (insert vicious expletive here) heat and the (insert most vicious expletive here) Central European addiction to deep frying everything. I won't complain about the beer, although I normally would, because that could be purchased from the nearby Czech beer festival, which made supporting the deliciously named Czech pilot (Sonka means ham in Hungarian) the most natural thing to do.

Time for Those Foggy Mornings

Every year people complain that winter comes suddenly: there's Indian summer and then the freezing winds of the Arctic, and you can't ever really wear your autumn jacket because you're either too hot or too cold in it. I am coming to think that the famous transition period- probably should be October-never really existed. It's simply that there is a point in autumn when temperatures rather abruptly plummet and you suddenly decide, right, so from today on I am officially cold. 

The up side of this momentous event is that it's also the start of fog season-but fog is, of course, notoriously fickle-you never know which morning it's gonna be there, if it's there, you never know if it's going to last long enough to make a pretty picture. And it's not any kind of fog we're talking about here, but Danube fog, which, even if it's there, can occasionally play the trick of comfortably floating along the river, like a humid fata morgana. This morning's fog was, however, the lazy fluffy candyfloss style, just hovering there over the water, feeling quite reluctant about revealing even giant sized buildings such as the Parliament.