à la carte spirit by ilona fried
Hungary
Budapest Then and Now: A Photo Essay
In an era when anyone can take a decent picture, even of themselves, with just one hand using a smartphone, it’s hard to recall a time when we needed a camera, film and two hands to capture a scene. Then, we decided in advance the number of exposures, the sensitivity to light we wanted and … Continue reading
How Many People, and Bulbs, Does It Take to Change a Light in Budapest?
Jet-lagged and dazed, I arrived to my Budapest rental on a rare sunny afternoon in early November. I’m revisiting a place I once called home and which evokes complicated emotions. On relatively short notice, I’d found a one-bedroom apartment through Homeaway.com. Paolo, the Italian property manager, greeted me when I stepped out of the taxi. I followed … Continue reading
Of this Daughter and “Son of Saul”
I am beginning to conclude that the past is always present. On January 11th I received a Facebook message from the mother of the Hungarian family that hosted me as a college student. “If possible,” she wrote in Hungarian, “go see ‘Son of Saul’. It just won a Golden Globe.” I Googled it. Learning that the film takes place at Auschwitz, … Continue reading
Collecting: Choice or Compulsion?
When I was four, my parents packed me and my two brothers into our pale yellow Chevy Impala station wagon and drove from Massachusetts to Mexico City for my father’s sabbatical year. Throughout those months we ventured to different towns and villages, each of which specialized in at least one distinctive craft, many of which my parents admired enough to buy. … Continue reading
Budapest: Beauty or Beast?
It’s Halloween, a chance to contemplate what is more creepy: a truly beautiful person masquerading as a hideous beast, or an attractive costume that camouflages beastly hate? Two very different news items on Hungary, one on beauty, the other on beastliness, grabbed my attention in the last week. The first, the results of a Conde … Continue reading
à la carte spirit by ilona fried 
Recent comments