This is the Széchenyi Chain Bridge across the Danube River in Budapest, Hungary. The structural supports on the sides of it look like an enormous bike chains. The yellow lights of the bridge are kind of interesting because they start out as green every night for maybe 1-2 minutes before quickly turning yellow. In the background here is Gresham Palace and then St Stephen’s Basilica (where you can see a 1000 year old hand in a jar). What is a little less obvious is that the Danube River is flowing well beyond it’s normal banks, more than 7 meters (23 feet) above its normal level I was told. The streets alongside the river are completely underwater, and so are most of the docks used to access the dinner boats that cruise up and down the river.
Ok, so you know you live a pretty charmed life when you get to spend a long 4th of July weekend in Europe for kicks. Life has been pretty good to me, and I’m lucky to have friends who work for the airlines who can hook something like that up. I managed to sleep not in a plane 3 out of 5 nights… Our weekend looked a bit like this…
Wednesday afternoon:
The Flooded Tunnel
Pickled Jello
Guy with Tickets
- Fly to Chicago to join up with friends at O’hare
- Find out the standby route to Budapest that looked great last night is now a disaster (with weather, cancellations, etc – these things change fast!)
- Stare in awe at the pile of tickets Guy has to cover every possible flight possibility
- Consider going to Kuwait instead
- Get lucky and get on our connection to Munich
- Eat pickled Jello with eggs and grey ham for breakfast
- Connect to Budapest
- Get a badly needed shower
- Walk around one of the coolest cities in Europe to explore
- See roads on the edge of the Danube River flooded by 20+ feet of water
- Grab dinner and head out til 4am
- Order a pizza and go to sleep before it arrives
- Sleep for the first time in more than 24 hours
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It’s Friday now, right?:
Budapest Market
Hiding from the Downpour
- Eat the pizza I ordered last night for breakfast
- Head to the market
- Try heading to the Opera House to take a look, duck for cover in heavy downpour instead
- Walk into St Stephen’s Basilica, where we see the world’s oldest fist pump (1000 year old hand in a jar)
- Climb a lot of stairs for a great view of Budapest from the top of the Basilica
- Inspired by the fist, I finish the pizza for lunch around dinner time
- Head for Gellért bath house before it closes
- Marvel at one of the beauty of the building, jump in a wave pool, sit in a “dry sweating room” at 82C (180F), thermal bath
- Out til some late time, sleep 4 hours
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Saturday, I think:
Old Town, Bratislava
Bratislava from the Gate
- Get on a 2.5 hour train to Bratislava (aka Pozsony, aka Pressburg), Slovakia
- Think, “man, it’s wierd that I can travel to what used to be a communist country with no ID or border control”
- Walk around the beautiful cobblestone in the Old Town
- Walk up the hill to Bratislava castle and panoramic view of the city
- Walk past the UFO on the bridge over the Danube
- Walk around the not so beautiful (but very interesting) block apartments on the other side of the Danube
- Marvel at the kids playground that would never be built in a country with lawyers
- Watch life-size chess and listen to a public concert (violins playing “Bohemian Rhapsody”)
Bratislava Apartments
UFO
- Train back to Budapest
- Dinner, out to Szimpla Kertmozi, sleep 1 hour
- Flight to Frankfurt, Washington DC, Chicago, Minneapolis
- Get a badly needed shower
- It’s Sunday night now, right?
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I’ll have some more pics up in the coming days…
My wide angle lens ended up COVERED in guacamole with this shoot… anything for the pic!
Technique: SB-800 with diffusion dome handheld and connected via SC-17 cord.
I’ve updated my portfolio (which is linked in the menu bar at the top) to add some more photos and clean up the navigation. Just click on an album to start viewing pictures, and click on an image if you want to switch to full screen mode (note that full screen only works on the portfolio link, not with the embedded version below). Please let me know what you think!
In setting up the new blog, I did some looking back at the numbers, and the various CarbonSilver / Tundra / Flickr / Fotki material I’ve put up has about 600,000 hits now. The new CarbonSilver site is definitely where things will be for the future, and seems to be getting an enthusiastic response (Feedburner RSS / email subscriptions increased 5X in the first couple of days). Thanks to all who’ve taken the time to visit the site, leave a comment, or email me.
Most of the time, shots taken well after the sun is down just don’t look right. A black sky can really kill an image, so a deep blue sky after sunset is normally where I like to shoot. But I kept shooting long after that to experiment, and like how the shot came out. But here the sky just wasn’t going to go black, there’s just so much light being shot up into the night sky that it’s subtle colors on a grey fog.
If you’re looking for other great local shots of the Twin Cities, be sure to check out the work of Wayne Moran (aka WaynePhotoGuy) on Flickr.
I hope everyone is having a great July 4th holiday with friends and family! (and for foreign readers of this blog, I hope you’re also doing something fun!)
Ironically, as this post comes out, I’m not in the States (I pre-wrote a couple days of posts this week). Where? I don’t know, It’s a surprise (even to me). I’m flying standby with a friend in the airline industry, so we’ll end up somewhere in Easter Europe for a couple days – depending on what final routes are open when we get to Germany. I should be nearly back by the time you read this, with some fun pics to share… Have a great weekend!
The Twins are pretty interesting. Minneapolis is sort of the boisterous brother who gets all the attention, and St Paul the quiet brother whose also interesting, but goes a little less noticed. Everyone in the Twin Cities has a favorite (I think mine’s pretty apparent, although I enjoy the other tremendously as well). And it’s funny, because people rarely cross from one side to the other… somehow the 15 minute drive seems like an eternity in a city with traffic that’s pretty smooth most of the time. After shooting the Twin Cities for a couple years, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s REALLY hard to photograph St Paul, and I think that doesn’t really help it get noticed. There are few really outstanding angles on the city… But I’ve got some ideas I hope to execute soon that I hope will provide some original perspective. This shot was taken from the High Bridge across the Mississippi River.
The 3rd Ave Bridge gets no love really – the Stone Arch and I-35W bridge sort of steal the spotlight – but I think it’s one of the most interesting bridges on the river. Here is is from a couple different angles. The tall vertical was shot from a balcony on the Carlisle Building (the Mill Place Office Building is the one with the very cool glass roof, the Stonearch Bridge is the other orange bridge down the river). The horizontal shot was taken on the opposite side of the river one night on my ride home from work. Someone commented that it looks like the Eiffel Tower, and I see the image in a whole new way now. Apparently the bridge is curved the way it is to avoid fracturing the limestone bedrock that supports it.
by carbonsilver
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