Budapest, Hungary

All I can think to put here are puns on "Hungary", so I put this instead.

It is 1:13pm and I am standing atop the ramparts of the St. Gellert Citadel, overlooking the darkly defined bends of the Danube winding its way south through the hazy cityscape into the distance. The air is refreshingly cool at this elevation, a soft breeze countering the harsh sunlight etched across a thousand rooftops below me. These aging, bullet-pocked walls depict a story of recent revolution, lined with fearsome statues sharing the view with a dozen snapshot-happy tourists. I head away from them all, down the mercifully shaded forest paths of Buda's lush jagged hills.



At this trip's inception, I made a habit of rolling some queries around my head, applying them to the various places where I found myself. What defines a place? How do you accurately represent a location through photography?

Though they have yet to be fully answered, in the short time I've spent stomping around Europe, I think those questions have changed. My thoughts have shifted to further to the esoteric, and my questions deeper into notions of beauty.



It is 4:39pm and I am sitting at a table half-immersed in slanted sunlight outside Café Eklektik, which is situated awkwardly on the edge of an (allegedly) two-way street just off the main drag of Pest. I've just been served my order of herby goat cheese, which has been accompanied by steaming slices of homemade bread so fresh that it has to be straight from the oven. I can't imagine how they even managed to slice it, it's so soft. Alongside this stands my freshly-squeezed orange juice, and I suddenly have everything I didn't realize i was craving.

There's a small casino next door sporting the odd moniker "Rough Luck", and currently catering to a solitary customer. She sits idly at a theme-less slot machine with a perpetually bouncing infant strapped to her chest. Staring listlessly at the traffic down the way, she idly teeters the slot lever every 20 seconds, sending the child into a brief eruption of glee as the wheels click and spin in a flurry of burnt-out marquee lights.

I sip my OJ.



What makes something beautiful? How is it that different people from different places and different backgrounds can all look at something and agree that beauty exists within it? Are we all simply capable of glimpsing that veiled harmonious element of nature, some perfect building block of the universe that resonates within us whether we consciously recognize it or not? Are we all hardcoded down to the DNA with the same fundamental aesthetic appreciations, regardless of life experience? Can something as personal, and often illogical, as art even be affixed with answers to such analytical questions?

Most of the time I've spent studying art and aesthetic has been circled around this very thought - the definition and "mathematics" of beauty, I suppose. Tomorrow I head to Italy - I think it will be an appropriate place to keep such notions in mind. And to get some good lasagna.



It is 8:18pm and I am dangling my feet over the Danube as the horizon magnificently devours the last remnants of the day in a feast of violet and deep roseate hues, all fractured and dancing across the river's restless surface below me. The left bank's spires have faded to silhouettes against the fading sunlight, and a tired stillness overtakes the city in the long hour before it is all abruptly revitalized by evening nightlife.

I sit here for a long, long while.