The guesthouse owner looked incredulously at us as we dismounted from the minivan and it became clear that it wasn’t ours. We’d gotten the same slightly suspicious glances a few years back when we’d arrived in Giardini Naxos, Sicily, in the same carless state. Crazy, crazy folk. We’d approached Szigliget by train, on the slow,…
Lizard Kingdom on Eagle Hill: A Walk on Sas-hegy
Our first attempt at summiting Sas-hegy was, in the words of the great ancient philosopher Clarksonius, BC 4, a terrible disappointment. Sometime in spring it had come to our attention that this particular hill, lying in the cosy proximity of the BAH interchange and the MOM park shopping mall, had eluded our attention in the…
Procrastinator’s Log 0521
Sometime this month I found yet another article about imposter’s syndrome. And whenever I find such a thing, even if I forgot that imposter syndrome existed at all, I remember it, and just as when you google your symptoms and the condition is unavoidably lethal, I succumb to it as well. Luckily, there is an…
Arad 50/mm Returns
Home. It’s where the cats hate me in a very specific, familiar way. An antagonistic yet friendly way. They acknowledge I belong to the landscape, organically, like the trees, the asphalt, the houses, and the metal gates. I am one with their surroundings, and they hate me with passion, because they are cats. They turn…
Procrastinator’s Log 0321
Well, this wasn’t the month when things got fixed, or even marginally better. I still have no idea when will I be able to travel home without worries, know that my friends and family are safe, go for a (one, several) careless pint(s) in a pub. On the up side, there’s that ship stuck in…
What We Do in the Lockdown
It’s been a year now of this liminal state, when walking in the bright sunshine of the deserted city feels like the odyssey of a vampire sneaking in the dark, alone with ghosts and shadows. The dark itself doesn’t even seem to exist anymore; we’re locked out of it by the night curfew. We’re locked…
Procrastinator’s Log 0221
It’ll soon be one year since the lockdown, in some form or another, started and every now and then I suddenly miss something from our life ‘before’. Say, going to museums, just getting lost for hours, until my back and feet hurt and I felt overwhelmed by everything I’d seen. These days, there is the…
Procrastinator’s Log 0121
The log is BACK. It dawned me that I procrastinated the log for the past months for the very reason I procrastinate everything else- I have the attention span of a Labrador puppy, and writing the damn thing just lasted way too much. So from now on I will stick to this fancy thing people…
Ode to a Muddy Stream- A Year of Walking by the Rákos-patak
It came in waves, like the sea, but the unpleasant sort, a cold sea with mud and plankton. Wave one, the paranoid days. Cases in Hungary were still low in spring, but as lockdown loomed, we stayed inside and, quite unnecessarily as per the latest studies, disinfected doorknobs and beer cans. Wave two, the second…
A Good List Goes a Long Way- 2020 Edition
This year I skipped the ‘traditional’ best of posts, as they simply did not feel right. There have been good moments, but most of it was about lying low and waiting for the light at the end of the tunnel, hoping it’s not a train. I do not want to overdramatize either. I suffered no…
Pocket Diary Budapest 