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.
