just some words about the place i am currently spending my life in. spending my life; sounds like i'm paying for something with it. what i do get in return though is the joy of good times, times that can only be found if experienced through the arrogance of a stranger in a country that he will never fully know. it annoys me, it's like living under the protection of some parenthood telling me i'm not allowed to play in the dirt, only seeing the city in the light it wants to be seen in.
it is a beautiful light though. the burning sun, once it calms down in the evening, the old pretty buildings dipped in the pink / orange / golden light, it gives you such a beautiful, fake peace. the people drying their clothes by the danube, the people selling lavender bouquets and useless batteries on the squares, the people asking you for two hundred forints in broken german and hungarian, all dipped in that gold, just no peace about them. in the end, it's the same everywhere, but seeing it in a foreign country, with pompous buildings and gloriously lit bridges as a backdrop, with prices in the supermarkets that make everything back at home seem overpriced and ridiculous, you feel more helpless.

two hundred forints, that's less than a euro and also the entrance fee for zöld pardon, one of the places of budapest that i would like to take home with me, especially since next summer, it will be replaced by a museum. shit would go down. dancing under stars, on wooden planks, until the first sign of tiredness. then the sprinklers go on, dancing under water showers with a swelling feeling of happiness that erases all exhaustion. until sunrise and beyond. szimpla, another place i want to take with me. i could live there, in the rundown walls full of scribbles and stories, between lamps that all make you dream of the people who might have cherished them once, in armchairs, dentists' chairs, bathtubs, under bikes with flowers growing out of them and so many more things to discover in every corner.
on a more serious side, work is good. home is good. people are good. i have more or less learnt understanding northern irish and scottish accents, i made friends with the world, and at work i make little paper boats. no actual boats, more like little boxes where we weigh and keep our samples, tablets, powders, but we call them boats which brings a little bit of romanticism into life at the lab. just a bit, but it's something. sometimes i even feel like a scientist, pouring things around, writing down numbers, stopping time. i'm at the cutting edge, the edge that cuts - i'm nowhere - but it's good to see what clever people can do in a lab. and it's good to see that they are the ones who love what they do. makes me feel kinda worthless.

budapest, steaming in the heat. summer is merciless, being on ancient buses, with fit hungarians looking out of the windows, light shirts and aviators, wind flowing through their hair, but only a small amount of air making it through the thick heat, standing next to old people with grim faces. i feel like it could be south america, which is beautiful because it finally feels like i'm somewhere else. also, time is dislocated, way too fast. i want a car from the fifties, a cigar and a spanish accent, but all i have for now is the rum. i love rum, and one of the highlights of my day is getting home from work and having a cold drink with ice cubes.

Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top.
At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.

as for photography, there's a lot to capture. let's see if i'll ever manage. the pictures are only in my head for now.