Home for the Holidays

It's quite fashionable to moan about the white Christmases of yore and how they don't happen anymore, but I honestly can't recall any. It's not just that I cannot remember a snow-apocalypse type Christmas, I simply can't say if there was snow, ever. This is probably partly due to the fact that I was particularly susceptible to colds as a child, and I would dread winter weather in any of its forms, as it could trigger anything from sniffles to mild pneumonia. Nothing lethal, of course, but Christmas with mild pneumonia kind of loses some of its shine. 

On the other hand, I do think that December is not a typical snow month in Arad. Because I clearly remember biggish snowfalls in November, and pretty devastating ones in both January and February. Those of February had a particular knack at annoying me, as I was kind of already waiting for spring and then, oh damn, let me shovel myself out of five feet of snow on my way to school.

I was therefore completely cool with the fact that on the 23rd of December I undertook my final Christmas shopping in what could be called splendid spring sunshine, while listening to people tragically complain about how they really don't feel like mulled wine, but they'd rather have a spritzer. Have it, for Pete's sake, add some cinnamon and you're good to go. 

I was also quite delighted by not having my hands freeze on my shopping bags, and taking in some vitamin D in the process. For the rest of time, it was quite foggy. Which is more wintry, sure, and I do think it looks splendid, but fog is also ruined for us these days, since it's most probably not good old honest fog, but it's hideous industrial friend, smog. But no matter what, commonplace as it sounds, it's good to be home for Christmas, doing some of the things you always did, and some new ones too, because every tradition has to start somewhere, I guess.

Houses We Built

Anyone can take pictures these days, you don’t even need to subject yourself to the hassle of carrying a camera around: your phone is smarter than you and always readily available to fire away.

The problem is that, in the meantime, we have kind of forgotten how to actually look at things. And see them. Not just store them away for later, when we’re going to click through them in a frenzy, post them to God knows which social platform and occasionally bore a bunch of friends with a slightly tedious slide show of fifty shades of the Eiffel tower.( It’s actually mostly grey, yes.)

Ideally a photograph should mean a new way of seeing things, or a way to discover that which we have not seen before. Shooting old buildings in nice angles might seem like a rather shallow preoccupation of the Instagram generation- but it’s led me to become more aware of my surroundings, their history, and to ultimately form a different picture of myself.

As a child I often wondered as to which of my (then physically imagined) halves is Romanian and which is Hungarian, because, once I would discover the identity of my left side, I would know the nationality of my heart and would therefore belong somewhere.

And, quite logically, here comes architecture to save the day. The more I pointed my camera to buildings around Arad, the more they started to resemble those in Budapest, Vienna or Novi Sad.  Smaller, a bit shabbier, a tad in disrepair, but it’s all connected- there’s an area of the world where people with often similar identity dilemmas lived, worked, created, and made a history which was not always the best or the smartest, but it’s the history we share and that stares back from us from the faces of the houses we built.