cloudsoup

Weeping Rock, Zion Canyon, Utah

Once you’ve seen what’s possibly the World’s most interesting museum of ethnography, the marvellous Pitt Rivers in Oxford, other ethnographic collections may seem rather dull by comparison; but the Budapest Néprajzi Múzeum (Museum of Ethnography) seems to have gone out of it’s way to disappoint.

The terribly polite DK Guide suggests that the Budapest collection is overshadowed by the building in which it’s housed, which is certainly true. Half of one floor is devoted to the permanent exhibition, a collection of artefacts from the last 200 or so years (excepting the period of communist rule).

Particularly concerning is the scant representation of the Roma in Hungary’s national ethnographic collection and as far as I could see absolutely no representation of Hungary’s Jewish population. About one-third of the Jews murdered at Auschwitz came from the enthusiastically collaborating wartime Hungary.

If you would like to take photos inside the museum you’ll be expected to pay a surcharge and then the officious and clearly bored staff inside will invent arbitrary rules such as; no flash; no use of mini tripod; and so on.

A dull museum, whose collection is scandalously incomplete given Hungary’s sometimes unfortunate history.

Brief video from our trip this summer.

Music: Explosions in the Sky.

Talking of Normandy, this is a snippet I captured in Pont-l’Évêque this Easter (or Pâques). I liked the tune but have no idea what it is. Anyone?

It was twenty years ago this month that Helen and I went on our first holiday together. We heaved our bicycles, panniers and rucksacks onto the train from London to the South Coast and without having booked any hotels in advance, caught the ferry to Cherbourg.

In Coulombs, 1988

It was my first visit to France. In later years I got to know the country better and even worked a little in Paris but on this first trip the country and the culture were almost entirely new to me.  The rhythm of the days  was determined by France’s strangeness; if we cycled until midday and stopped to  buy food, the small food shops — the charcuterie, the boulangerie — would be shut. When it got late and we needed to find  a place to stay, I’d have to struggle with my rudimentary French and never did get the hang of quickly counted change passed over after a purchase, or of asking for the bill in a restaurant or bar. I still think you’re is supposed to ask for l’Addition but I’ve never heard anyone else do it.

We cycled down the Cherbourg peninsula to St Malo, where we stayed for a while. Then we took a train across to Caen and cycled back via Bayeux to Cherbourg.  The day we cycled from Caen to Bayeaux we were caught in a downpour and found shelter in the doorway of a church in the tiny village of Coulombs. While we dried out and waited for the rain to stop, we carved our initials into one of the stone walls of the porch.

carved initials from 1999

Purely by chance we were passing through Normandy ten years later — ten years ago — so we drove through Coulombs again and visited the church that had sheltered us a decade before. We found our initials and we added a second set. 1989 and 1999.

This year, we were more deliberate about visiting, and arranged a brief Easter break around Bayeaux and Rouen.

Inside Rouen cathedral

We drove to Coulombs again. We couldn’t find the original carved initials this time but we found the second set from a decade ago and we added another carving to commemorate our third visit and twenty years of being together and taking holidays.

carved initials from this year

We have photos of ourselves taken in Coulombs on that holiday twenty years ago, and of our second visit ten years ago. This year the village felt at first very unfamiliar; the roads seemingly not crossing at the right place, and not heading off in the remembered directions, or the tree under which we sheltered appearing smaller than I recalled; then the memories of that first visit slowly returned as if the span of two decades was just a few months, or at most a year; not twenty years. As I grow older it isn’t the prospect of ageing that scares me; it’s the prospect of the time that’s gone,  a sense of depth to the time that’s almost like vertigo.

Still think that the quality of this record of our trip to Munich last December is better than some of the USA videos from the summer. I wonder if there’s something I’m not understanding about video formats…

Aside from Doom, many years ago, about the only game I’ve ever enjoyed playing much on a PC is MS FlightSim. Imagine how gutted I was by the news of the closure of the Aces Game Studio.

Anyway, I still have FSX, the latest version, and as a slightly anxious flyer I like to prepare for long journeys by trying to make the flight myself – epecially the landing. So for our upcoming trip to the US Northwest I have a 747 in BA livery and I’m going to plan the flight from LHR into Seattle with as much realism as I can build in.

Here’s another tip for nervous passengers. Keep your eyes on the faces of the cabin crew. As long as they look bored you know you’re ok.

View Easter, 2009 in a larger map

First film with the new Panasonic HDC SD9