When I was a kid, I used to be sooooo naive. And had plenty of vivid imagination to constantly make things worse. One day it occurred to me that the billboard display I was passing on my way to the city is actually a sort of archive. Layers after layers of posters that could tell quite a story if they would be soaked in water and put apart. All true, just that I thought that the posters one could uncover would date way back to 1920s and 1930s. Quite some layers, huh ;) Luckily, I kept this one to myself for quite some time.
Filed under: Black eye cafe | Tags: bear, Budapest, characters, fun, semiotics, sign
383.477 and still piling up.
Thanks for bearing with me :)
Filed under: Things as they are, Travels and trips, photography | Tags: Budapest, doorways, ornament, tiles
You didn’t expect I’d come back without a few of theese, did you?
I might have mentioned that one of steady treats of our travels is a walk. We like to search for the untouristy, somewhat more genuine heartbeat of the place, so we tend to walk around exploring. Barefoot anthropology, of a sort. But this is not what I’m talking about.
I know Razman doesn't like theese but the tram was a real feet saver. And a feast for Tamara.
It seems that in every place we go to, we are bound to have our “walk”, the unplanned long march up, down or around. This does not mean that we get lost (though that happened once in Udine). It normally it has to do with poor estimation of distances on the map (Istanbul), refusal to pay a minibus that miraculously converts into a cab (Syria), Lonely Planet errors (Homs, new bus station, not 5 min but 5 km from the old one!!) or provocative Lonely Planet comments (Nemrut Dag is NOT to be hiked from the last dolmus stop, neither up nor down, not even if you hold a passport of the hiking-crazy nation of Slovenia!!), following tips from magazines and blogs (Istanbul again), trusting locals (not even in New York).
Hommage to Amsters@m.
I only gave you one city for each and since the last one was only me (and my poor friend Floris), I guess I’m the one responsible for all the insane walking we did in the past.
Vernacular outdoor advertising - I have never seen so many of these in the streets.
The thing is, no matter how hard we try to prevent it or avoid it, “the walk” will always find us. It is out there, lurking, stalking, luring. Smiling. Or in this case, barricading.
1989 or 2009?
Saturday afternoon I skipped the closing sessions of the conference to spend a delightfull afternoon with my girls, spoiling our taste buds in one of the city’s oldest and finest coffehouses on our way.
Remnants of the past, and a brave, glittering new era.
Only, we never got there. Hungarian government was busy celebrating the 20th anniversary of the end of communism and half of the city was in barricades with police and other security guys swarming the place. There were more policemen than Hungarians there to celebrate the event, or to demonstrate. I guess there were more foreign polititians speeding up and down the baricaded streets than locals paying hommage to 1989. At least Tamara enjoyed the show of sirens an flashing lights.
One of Tamara's nightmares.
So we never got to the coffee and cake paradise, but after a long, unplanned detour, ended up again in Menza and had an early dinner instead. Now, if you are in need of some delicious food, Budapest has some great palces to offer. And Menza is definetly one of them.
Pork steak stuffed with feta & c.o. CC had chicken and sweet potatoes with honey&mustard sauce. Tamara had more than half of my potatoes.
It’s one of those chic, urban places serving what might be described as “international” food, though some traditional eats were sprinkled across the menue. Yummy. And not pricey.
Filed under: Black eye cafe, photography | Tags: amateur photography, Arcades project, cactus photograph, Passagewerk, Walter Benjamin, window
I have 123.555 reasons (without spaces) for not posting lately and a conference in Budapest instead of one of those cherries for the top. The deadline for my thesis in coming round fast, but here is a little quote I’d like to share with you. Pics from Budapest will follow.
In his unfinished Passagewerk (Arcades Project) Walter Benjamin notes down a following paragraph from Louis Figuier’s La Photographie: Exposition et historie des principales decouvertes scientifiques modernes:
Hours after Arago reported Daguerre’s invention to the Chamber, the optitian’s shops were besieged; there were not enough lenses, not enough dark rooms to satisfy the zeal of so many eager amateurs. The sun sinking on the horizon was followed with a gaze of regret, taking with it the raw material of the experiment. But on the following day you could see great numbers of experimenters at their windows in the first hours of daylight, striving with every kind of nervous precaution to induce onto the prepared plaques images of the nearby dormer window, or the view of a population of chimneys.
Photographic technologies change, but in some ways, it still feels like 1839 in Kamnik. Only, it’s not chimneys but blossoming cactuses. Well, the general shape is about the same :)
