Arad/50 mm

I might claim that my project of shooting one day in Arad strictly with the 50 mm lens was a great artistic endeavour of which I thought long and hard and which was aimed at revealing something in particular about the town I’ll always fondly call home.  The truth is, I was lazy. Lazy to take the other lenses to me, lazy to change them according to my subject, just lazy in general because we set out on a very fine autumn day, which the weather gods had proclaimed to be the last but one very fine day of the year in general.

The next step was convincing myself that this is actually great, and will give disparate yet oft photographed subjects a kind of coherence which, as a rule,  lacks from both my person and what I might overblownly call my ouevre. Though I’ve recently read that nothing makes us more human than our capacity to firmly hold contradicting beliefs. Therefore I will claim that I both meant and did not mean this whole thing, and it both makes some sense- or none at all. 

Weekend Walks- Rózsadomb and Bits of the Second District

This was a walk we took in the weekend prior to becoming 100% involved with Sziget, so that is my grand excuse for posting them only now, but let’s say they are still relevant for a possible August 20th festive walk away from the celebratory throngs.

We started off from Moszkva square- where the newly opened Zing Burger establishment proudly sports the real name of the place. While we’ll grumble about the renaming till the end of the time, we must give it to the urban planners involved in the renewal project that fresh life was injected into a place which was looking ever more grimy and depressed.

From there we wandered into the mostly unknown, namely the sleepy residential areas of Rézmál and Rózsadomb- although there be no dragons here,  at least not at first sight, we found some pretty castle-ish edifices peering out defiantly from the greenery. We also startled some lizards and at least one cat, for the residents of the area themselves seemed to have retreated to the privacy of their hillside dungeons and mercifully taken their dogs too.

Although not all those who wander are lost, we most definitely were, and went full circle around Gül Baba’s türbe instead of taking the straight road to it- the türbe itself is sadly still closed to the public, but at last we could indulge in the somewhat startling presence of Gül Baba street, which has a decidedly Istanbul vibe. A few streets onwards, however, we felt as if we stepped into Paris, and here I will come to the point where I muse on how part of Budapest’s charm is that it has so many things going on within it, sometimes almost side by side.

After some caffeination in Törökméz, which, in spite of them name does not serve Turkish coffee, but pretty good Italian one, we descended towards more familiar grounds and went cloud hunting along Fő street, which is always a welcome alternative when you feel a bit overwhelmed by the sights of the Danube promenade on its left. 

Simple Green Something

I have many positive traits among which keeping my promises is paramount: like just half an hour ago I went into the corner shop solemnly promising myself I would buy nothing but half a kilo of super healthy peaches, and came out with a can of Guinness. (Which, of course, is good for you. So there, I almost did it.)

Now that I gave myself dubious press, I can move on to the part where I actually do keep a promise I made, and one week after our adventurous outing to Budafok and its environs, we have indeed paid a visit to another unexplored part of the Budapest galaxy, namely Népliget. I once threw a small tantrum of disbelief when reading about inhabitants of Istanbul who’ve never seen the Bosphorus, but frankly, what’s my excuse for not having been to Népliget? Going there we took the metro, but coming back we actually walked, with the added excitement of a detour into the infamous 8th district- so I wouldn’t necessarily say that the place is a stone throw’s away, but two would do the job. 

The first impression of the park is slightly eerie, as if you’re facing a faded, or perhaps simply wilder version of something, with an added whiff of socialist decrepitude. Some alleys are haphazard and overgrown, there are large, almost boulevardish roads, empty of both people and cars, like streets in some dictatorship’s fever dream ghost capital. It might have been the weather as well, a hot but cloudy summer’s day intensively pondering a storm which never came, but the park was borderline deserted- bar a weird couple sipping cheap beer on a bench, two homeless people drying their clothes and one person walking a dog (which, by Budapest standards is technically a negative number), the first living beings we came across were a whopping six squirrels frolicking quite audaciously in spite of the two mad humanoids chasing them with cameras. 

We also encountered a number of mind boggling memorials- the Polish soldier surrounded by flower beds was yet another wink to bygone times, joined by monuments dedicated to the gravestone makers and quarry men of Kőbánya- this latter piece of intel provided one of those epiphanies of the weak minded when I realized that of course the place must have been named Kőbánya because there were stone quarries there. 

The accidental finding of a Fradi training facility provided further random flashbacks, this time to a book on terrace culture I’d read, by the charming name of ‘Shit Ground No Fans’. I do hope not to give offence to any Fradi fans reading this, the new stadium, looming large on the other side of the park, is actually quite modern, but for Pete’s sake, what’s the point in that when you lose in the first round of Champions League pre-qualifiers to the team whom Albania sent when their title holder got kicked out for match fixing. Also, please explain the bird. Please.

To add insult injury, the only facilities we found which could provide us with beer were two ramshackle kiosks at the entry point closest to the stadium (we unwisely chose to ignore them at this stage) and two filling stations at the other end. Also, the only beer which was actually beer, like by German purity law standards ( I know I am horrible about this and will not even attempt to deny it), was DAB. So that is how I ended up sipping a totally random beer on a tropical Sunday afternoon, chasing squirrels. Which, if not yet described as one of life’s essential pleasures, damn well should be. Thank you Népliget for being a simple green something two stone’s throws away from where I live and sorry for having shunned you for your sisters with better beers- sometimes quirky is just nicer than nice. 

PS: We also accidentally wandered into Tisztviselőtelep, which, among other things hosts a ridiculously mis-shaped church and the hotel I stayed in the first time I laid eyes on the fair city of Budapest. About them, possibly, in an another exploratory chapter.