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Sunday 28 November 2010

Red sludge

This Friday, we took a 100-km road trip to a small town near the Slovakian border.


Our target: an abandoned alumina factory that closed down in 1996.


The compound contains several large industrial buildings, most of which are completely empty.



Only a control room and what seemed to be an office remained from this huge, gutted factory. The control room sat in one of the top corners of the roughly 5-story-tall, massive empty space. Well hidden, it was the only part of the building that was not stripped down to the last screw - it was locked away instead. All the doors leading to it were welded down, glass replaced with steel.




Obviously, we walked through the reinforced concrete without a problem. :)




The room-sized instrument panel was full of cryptic controls and readouts, belonging to machines that no longer existed. There were readouts that printed waveforms onto strips of paper like seizmographs.
The last pieces of data from the very last workday, the very last breaths of this monstrous factory complex, from over 15 years ago, were laid out in front of us on the dusty floor.




The cold winter breeze coming through the broken windows was moving the paper strips around as if they were a part of nature, like leaves on a tree - not an endless stream of cold statistics, precisely recorded by a machine, that became meaningless sometime in the nineties.


The constantly moving strip of paper was not easy to capture with the little compact camera - it would have been practically impossible, if it wasn't for the 35W halogen light bulb I acquired, fed from a huge battery.
The professional(-ly hacked together) light gear allowed me to capture this mechanical death certificate...


And art... Art is everywhere.




As we climbed the fence again and were back outside the compound, we realized that it's actually not raining - but snowing. The first snow of 2010 caught us inside an abandoned factory building at 3 AM. :)



We began the long journey back home, but after we passed a town or two the little snowfall pretty much turned into a blizzard. We drove most of the way in deep snow - with summer tires of course...
For quite a while we drove without lights, because we could see a lot further this way - with the lights on, all we could see was snowflakes coming at us, and about 5 meters of the road. Which is not very comforting.

It was really quite magical to glide through the fantastic, pure white landscape, with nothing but the faint glow of the Moon breaking the darkness.


On my way home in the frosty morning light, I happened upon something quite unusual: a hole with the bones and remnants of a strange animal I couldn't quite identify. I have no idea how, and why it got there - and once it got there, who dug it up, why did he leave it there, and how'd he know it was there in the first place?


Vajon hány elásott whatdisznó vár Budapest utcái alatt a feltámadásra?  :D


 
And finally, this photo was taken at sunset, just before - or during? - the cheapwine-induced alcohol-poisoning throw-up ritual. I don't even remember taking it.




U.I.: A what-disznóTM az alterBp Corporation névjegye vagy bejegyzett védjegye az Egybesült Államokban és/vagy más országokban. Mindennemű engedély nélküli használat 5 éves közszolgálatban elvégzendő közterületi óvszerhámozást, négyszeres életfogytig tartó szabadságvesztést, be- illetve lefejezést, puding általi halált, esetleg szigorított anális fegyházat, avagy biciklit von maga után.


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