A little pushed for time this evening, so please can I send you elsewhere (and request that you come back here again tomorrow)?
And the elsewhere is this CNN article on the hidden thermal caves beneath Budapest.
Some really interesting information:
Molnár János is still alive and growing. Water rich in hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide continues to percolate through the rock, creating a mildly acidic cocktail that eats at the walls. The result is a Swiss cheese labyrinth of chambers and passages.
And some stunning images:
I’ve been to Budapest a few times, and I had no idea about any of this.
Spotted online, this art installation which – using my Geoguessr skills – I have found to have been located in Erzsébet Tér (Elizabeth Square) in Budapest, Hungary.
It’s a UHD TV display:
…with a camera on the back:
… and the image on the screen plays the pictures from that camera – but delayed for exactly six months.
Being in a park with all those trees and their pesky, photo-blocking summer leaves means that obviously, the whole scene changes completely. And then you’ve got the currently incongruous meteorological conditions as well, as demonstrated here:
This video was posted in 2018 and I don’t think the installation is there anymore, but I really love the idea.
Who are the kids who were playing in the snow that day? What are they doing now as their images are shown on the TV? Are they at school, on their holidays, have they emigrated, died – are they even in the park today, lamenting the current lack of white stuff to fool around in?
Also, I wonder what was on the screen for the first six months of its life, given that it couldn’t have been recording the scene behind it previously because it simply wasn’t there. Despite having the name of this feature: pastWindow, information seems hard to come by.
I have a textual window to the past on here. Six months ago today, we were winding down for Christmas and winding up for the Second Wave. The more things change…
The trouble with starting a series like this on one’s blog is that there are often limited opportunities for continuing it. But that’s what makes it special, exclusive, unique.
Everyone has got photos of brunette girls with Eastern European parliament buildings between their legs; or photos of blonde girls with Western European parliament buildings between their legs. So why bother with that run-of-the-mill stuff?
It’s going the extra mile that makes this blog stand out from all those others.
Next week we begin our much anticipated series of posts of charcoal drawings of West African freshwater fish lying in wooden boxes.
