Tutti Liberi Subito- Best of Travel 2015

Too much cheap bullshit has been blown into the bloodstream of the Internet about how you should be a traveler, and not a tourist, so much so that the original statement has lost much of its meaning. What does being a traveler imply, after all, besides some Instagram shots of the second most interesting thing in a city as the first one is just too mainstream these days.

Thing is, I do instinctively hate organized tourism without having been taught to do so. Always did, even before having anything to do with herds of tourists flocking like hordes of barbarians to the Eiffel Tower, Colosseum or the Houses of Parliament. Though frankly, the barbarians get bad press, roaming around in a time of general continental mess is more justifiable than trampling little old ladies for a selfie. One of my worst nightmares is the time I had to grind through the endless maze of the Musei Vaticani to make it to the Sixtine Chapel- and once there, listen to a multilingual choir of ’this is it?!’.

No, that’s not it. ’It’ is that time I arrived in Turin in a fine winter drizzle, which had been advertised by the ever ebullient Italian media as ’forti nevicate al Nord’, and had to wait about an hour for the most elusive of buses. Under the sheltering umbrella of another transportation victim, I could quite literally soak in the city’s motions and rhythms.

Or that other time when I was sitting in the back seat of a car in the most average of villages in Turkish Thrace, watching the most average of summer evenings unfold in a way which was both completely familiar and alien. Or that time I was sitting in a cafe in Vienna, sipping a kleiner Brauner and staring into the distance, not really reading my book but listening to the indefinite lull of German surrounding me and saying to myself how, given the right time and place, it’s actually such a beautiful language.

And that time I turned away from the palace in Knossos and gazed over the hills around it, noticing how they shimmered in the scorching Mediterranean sun, hundreds of mirrors used by the locals to ripen their crops even faster- modern world insanity meets Balkan solutions to everything.

We Went to Szentendre This Sunday- Basically Because We Could

We’re still a bit in the Sziget comedown phase, which makes things that are not Sziget slightly uninteresting. Szentendre at least has the luck of being on the same HÉV line as Filatorigát, so we could squeak with delight and despair when we passed it.

Sziget jokes put aside, Szentendre is always a treat, a little jewel box of a town by the Danube, a stone throw’s away from the big city. It can get a bit tourist trap-y though in summer, especially in the past years it seems to have been discovered by some major tourist guides and agencies, because the number of aliens roaming its streets has grown exponentially. And as another post-Sziget comedown event, we discovered the hard way that you need to pay for parking in Szentendre’s touristy areas even of Sundays- so here, a very useful travel trip if there ever was one.

Other than that you can still find quiet streets even at noon on a Sunday and there’s some fine dining to be had on the terraces overlooking the Danube. Further entertainment was also offered by the superbly well rounded ginger cat who loitered around the restaurants of the main square being totally, completely and magnificently unbothered.

Reaching that level of unbotheredness definitely requires a lot of skill and native talent, which is mostly available only to felines, and of them, only to the chosen few. Since such skills can hardly be learnt, we were left with reveling in the beauty of the sight, shell shocked as by Lionel Messi’s tricks, seemingly so easy to him, but unattainable to all other living creatures.