Hello, Szombathely!

Reminiscent of someone's rotting feces and on par with our politicians' moral qualities, a revolting stench of ASS hits your nose with the strength of a thousand fists.

The unexpected olfactory attack penetrates the deepest parts of your subconscious so suddenly and insidiously that you fall right back out of the tram and onto the sidewalk, only to vomit all over yourself.

All doubts disperse, it becomes painfully clear: you have arrived back in Budapest.

My beloved city welcomed me home with this memorable experience, after spending two weeks in the delightful town of Szombathely. It was only my third time there, but it has already become my second favorite city, after the (homeless)capital.

Like I've noted before, I had the opportunity to use a proper DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) camera for the duration of my stay, thanks to my lovely girlfriend's dad. It's not anything too serious; a Canon EOS 1000D with kit lenses, aka. Canon's cheapest entry-level DSLR. The key to photography is not in the equipment however, but in the photographer's eyes - this is something I've learned after messing around with (often broken) point-and-shoot cameras for so long, especially after people with expensive DSLRs leave comments on my photos saying they wish they had such 'capable' equipment :-)

I spent 16 days in Szombathely, during which I took over 1,500 photos. That's with me barely paying attention to photography, as I was spending time with my girlfriend instead - but still, I somehow managed to take an average of 90 photos a day. :)

So now we shall see what it would be like if I had a (proper) camera, as I've had none for the past year and a half. This was the first time I had the opportunity to use an SLR however I saw fit.

As you can see, it was really fucking cold. What can one do in such freezing temperatures? Well drink, of course!
This was the first time in years that I drank Gin-and-Tonic again, and I realized why I used to like it so much: because it's gooooood!

The shot above was taken in Szombathely's dirtiest little pub, next to the train station.

But let's get down to business already!
During my first visit I found an abandoned Soviet military base. It has a lot of big buildings, which are unfortunately almost completely empty inside. The most interesting thing I found was a piece of a newspaper written in cyrillic letters, all the way from 1989.

Naturally, I made my way to the roof straight away. :)

When I first visited Szombathely this summer, I found a way onto the top of one of the 10-story highrises. Looking over the city skyline, I immediately noticed one building that was towering over the rest of the city with its 14 stories.

That might not sound like a lot for someone who's from a place with skyscrapers and the like, but in Hungary, it's rare to find something much taller than 10 floors, and that's with good reason: in the goldmine of century-old architecture and history that most Hungarian cities are, a featureless glass building or skyscraper would look absolutely useless, as would any building that sticks out from the skyline too much.


Of course, the Socialist era didn't pay too much attention to that, nor did it have much of a sense of aestethics:

As I found out, this is the tallest building in the city of Szombathely and the surrounding area, and as soon as I spotted it I decided I was going to conquer it the next time I'm here. And the icing on the cake? The three-story antenna tower on top :-)

It overshadowed the city's cute little 3-4 story buildings, like an evil monster of concrete...

...what a menacing sight.

Here's the above shot, only this time... from the other side:

  Hehehe...

To be continued.

At the top of Szombathely

I arrived at the gigantic building around 2 AM. I made sure that noone is around, then grabbed the outside of the scaffolding, and started climbing up. I could only get to around the 6th floor with one breath. While catching my breath I had some time to look at the view, and the nothingness below me. Except for my two arms, nothing whatsoever was stopping me from falling to my death.

So I climbed upward, all the way to floor 15, aka. the roof. A ladder took me up to the "sixteenth", which was the base of the antenna. I was now on the highest man-made point in the city of Szombathely, and indeed in all of the county it resides in.

Make sure to view the pictures in full size - I noticed blogspot makes them blurry when it downsizes them. So click away!

(helipad)

Those 10-floor highrises seem as tiny as lego bricks from here...

I took a roughly 180° panorama in the morning; this size doesn't do it justice, click here for an even bigger view :)

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-disznó^TM 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.