My life in June was relatively uneventful, as is appropriate for this time of year here in Hungary. Not only did Daniel and I spend another two exhausting weeks scrambling to get into our apartment, but we’ve just entered the inertia of “cucumber season”. It’s precisely as many people here have warned: the most exciting event worth reporting is that the cucumbers have begun to ripen…and by how much. Throngs have fled the city after enduring the monotony of their jobs for yet another year (as we in the U.S. are all too familiar with). And although there is an influx of tourists, thickening around festival hotspots, the streets still seem quieter than usual. Though I sometimes feel that I should attend some of these festivals—by missing them surely I’m cheating myself out of an opportunity to fully experience this place—the truth is that we collapsed into our new home with fervor. We didn’t go out except for necessities, instead enjoying books, documentaries, and wine. Friends came to us.
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| Fehérvári Úti Piac (market) |
After a week glued to the couch, we peeled ourselves off and went to Fehérvári Úti Piac, one of several markets in Budapest where countryside vendors flock to sell their goods. It’s where we go now for freshly-made cream cheeses, milk that still tastes like earth and grass, home-cured Hungarian sausages, fruits and veggies that have never seen pesticides, and farm eggs sold by women who squint oddly at us when we ask if their chickens are free-range. This fare is unsullied. It’s unadulterated. And it’s cheap. Wares not touted as organic, the spirit of food the same as it’s been since before the tidal wave of the green/bio campaign, Fehérvári Úti Piac is where residents of Budapest go to save a Forint.
We managed some leisurely exploring, appreciating the hushed inactivity of the first summer mornings. We took a few pictures, the most interesting of which was this shrapnel-scarred building (either from WWII or the 1956 Revolution). Evidence of bullets is all over the city, but this particular pattern around the window brings the reality of war times to the forefront. There was someone in that apartment once, spotted by whoever was on the ground.
We also attended two DJ events this month. The first, a performance by a group called Dav Trió, was my favorite, musically speaking. The DJ spun breakbeats while a violinist and a cellist played live.
We walked through a slaughterhouse compound—at night—to get to the second DJ event, a party where Daniel’s friend was spinning. The party, small relative to the size of the massive, columned room that did not appear as though it belonged to a slaughterhouse, was weird, but entertaining despite its weirdness. People played foosball, at the back girls tried on loud, bright, furry, pointy, sequined, and flowery vintage clothing from a rack, competing for the most bizarre combinations, and an American guy wandered around with a blow-up pool flotation device, shoving it at drunk and unsuspecting partygoers to snap photos of them holding it. I hope my picture doesn’t show up on Facebook somewhere.
I also participated in a lifestyle-themed Art Nouveau walk the last Saturday of the month, hosted by Budapest Underguide. I had a lot of fun with the camera and have submitted an article about Art Nouveau on Untapped Cities if you’d like to learn more about the style that became a global phenomenon at the turn of the 20th century. Here are some pictures from the walk and you can see more on Untapped.
Photo caption: To the right is the façade of Mai Manó Ház, built from 1893-1894. The building is home to the Magyar Fotográfusok Háza (House of Hungarian Photographers). A detail of the façade is to the left.
Photo caption: To the left is the façade of Alexandra Bookstore, built in 1911, on Andrássy Út. To the right is the ceiling of the bookstore’s tea and coffee shop. It is a combination of both Art Nouveau and the Neo-Renaissance style from which many artists of the time strove to distance themselves.
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