I’m not going to pretend I didn’t find any paperclips in the past six weeks. I simply did not write about them. This is the moment in which I could pretend I was too busy – we had our final exams at Corvinus, we had our final moments among each other, we had our worries about the snow chaos and not getting home for Christmas. Perhaps I was just too lazy, or I lacked the words.

But among all this I found a paperclip at exactly the right moment. It was Monday, the 17th of December. As one of the last, that was the day I finished my exams – with a bang and an oral exam in Islamic Sciences. In the evening we met for dinner, like most days in the last weeks, no one was staying at home really.  Some of our friends had already left, and Monday night was Lauren’s, Esther’s and Liza’s last night before returning to the Netherlands. With ten people or so we walked to Morisson’s Opera, “M1”, after eating at a restaurant with a forgettable name.

In Morisson’s at some point that night, I found two paperclips caught up in each other. Caught up in each other we all were that night. With our arms around our shoulders we sang sad songs on the karaoke machine, and we did not care that the operator turned up the music so our singing became inaudible. We sang “the time of my life”, “eternal flame”, “ironic”, and a few Backstreet Boys classics, and we waited impatiently when this one guy sang Bryan Adams and thought he was real good. And we cried. We cried for leaving our friends, and for our leaving friends. We cried for having finished the studies here, the exams, the coffee-place at Corvinus, the restaurants, the parties. We were done, and we didn’t want to. That night at M1, we were all that – still there, still together, still singing, dancing, laughing, crying. It was the time of our lives. That’s cheesy, but I don’t care.

I found a paperclip at Mücsarnok, on Saturday. I’d tell you the full story, but that would start a month ago and although a lot has happened in that time, you probably don’t want to (and don’t need to) read about all that.

Two weeks ago a good friend from Maastricht, Nina, visited me. We began the sightseeing tour immediately after I picked her up, and we started at my favorite Internet Café. – Yes, internet café. It’s a cozy little place off Deak Ferenc ter that we occupy not for the internet-cause but for sheer culinary pleasure. A plastic folder, stuffed with pages and pages with one-liner descriptions of all sorts of dishes – Hungarian, Italian, snacks, soups, drinks, coffees, just a lot of dishes – all neatly accompanied by a 10x15 photograph. However, Nina and I did the whole tour: the Gellert Mountain, the Basilica, Szechenyi Bath, practically the whole 101 of Budapest’s tourism, plus the parties in the evening.

By the time she’d left and two days later another friend from Maastricht (Christian) arrived, I was so over tourism. Thankfully, Christian had planned to discover bars and cafés over the Lonely Planet version of the city, so we didn’t do too much of the walking at daytime, but at night. Except Saturday, when we slept barely long enough (due to my very light-hearing apartment and my housemate’s mother who came to clean everything that she felt we didn’t clean often enough – thanks anyways…), we did a cultural program.

After a short detour to the outskirts of the city (not even…it just feels this way when you never leave the 4,6 tram circle), where we bought a bus ticket for my visitor, we lunched on the fabulously small, cozy and fragrant Christmas market on Vörösmarty Ter. In fact, we had sausage with meat and cabbage with meat, any carnivore’s feast.

With the just-as fabulously small Metro 1 we took off to the Hero Square where the Budapest Art:Fair was held at the Mücsarnok. Admittedly, once you’ve seen the TEFAF at Maastricht, any art fair can only look like a nice try, but the Art:Fair was really that: a very, very nice fair with works from mainly eastern European artists in both classical and modern styles. This is where I found the paperclip. For the sake of it: yes, it looks like a normal paperclip, just that it’s huge and made from wood and both Christian and Claudia (who joined us for the event) doubted whether “art” is the right word for it – but they did that for almost all of the works exhibited in the modern art category… But the thing next to it IS a carved pencil. Not kidding. (See picture below)

By Sunday, when my last visitor for this year left, I was so tired and wrecked from all that had happened: Mumus, one of my favorite bars had closed down (I got an empty Palinka bottle of theirs during their farewell party), I found one or two new cool spots in Budapest, we had the first snow (blizzard, I dare say), snowball fights, temperatures below zero and still so much fun, a lack of sleep, too much food, and I might end up studying here next year after all…

What a week! The weather feels like spring. After we felt that we might need our winter coats as early as September, the temperatures rose back to 18°C in the last couple of days. An amazing Indian summer showed Budapest’s trees more than the sunshine in September, and the orange and golden leaves compliment the city even better than green trees. It is absurd how we felt that there is nothing green in the city, and now there are discolored trees all over the place. In the course of Verzio documentary film festival, the weather was an absurd balance to the disturbing “a film unfinished” that I saw Wednesday night. It was more by accident that we ended up watching a documentary about a 1942 propaganda film, but in retrospect, it was good that we did. It took us the entire evening of discussions and conversations to comprehend what we had just seen, and it’s hard to grasp how we usually abstract horror so we can talk about it lightly. There’s no need to talk lightly, we decided. It was good that we had to see the images of the Warsaw Ghetto.

That’s also why I decided to join a discussion round about the filmmaker’s role in documentary movies on Friday. On my way to Arany Janos Utca, I took a couple of pictures. Everything seemed to be glowing and radiating. At Arany Janos Metro station, where I was going to meet Lisa, I was baffled with Dejá Vu. This was where we walked past, three years ago, or four years ago? Konni, Felix, Laura and I. We bought postcards at this metro station, and breakfast, before we marched to the Basilica with our huge backpacks. It was our last day in Budapest, and we didn’t like it very much. Arany Janos changed. Maybe it didn’t. There are still a few homeless people, it still does not look nice, and the little benches that we sat on to eat still looked exactly the same. I was surprised that I remembered so well...I’ve been here for over two months now, and the only time my first visit to Budapest came to mind was on Margit Sziget, when I saw the statue on which Laura and I sat for a photograph.

The discussion round was alright. A colorful mix of students, researchers and film enthusiasts, a few documentaries, the setting of the beautiful Open Society Archives. It made sense to be there, and it felt alright, and the Archives amazed me for being so little like, well, archives. They look rather like a museum-slash-library, with an exhibition on the ground floor, libraries and laboratories on the first and second floors. The building, inside and out, and the small cafeteria next to it, do not look like they should be in the vicinity of Arany Janos Metro station. But this is what makes Budapest it.

Yesterday I had set out for a walk to the park, which required me to take Tram 2 to Vörösmarty Ter and then the Metro to the City Park. In the tram, a nice breeze came through the open windows and the sun shone on my face. I got a text message from Claudia asking me to come to Csendes Café, so I changed my plans and walked through the leaves and the grass at Vigado Ter and through the city (without a map!) to the lovely, lovely Csendes. I passed Gerlóczy Kavéhaz, one of my favorite coffee houses. It’s off the beaten track and the pictures of Martin Mukacsi’s exhibition hang on the string of lights outside. Also, obviously, they serve very good coffee.

While I am stuck with mixed impressions, I guess I can mention a paperclip I found outside an antiquarian bookshop in Lonyay Utca a few days ago. It is rather unspectacular; Lonyay utca is filled with paperclips, especially around the book store, copy shop and university. But as a metaphorical paperclip, here’s a tie between a movie I will watch at Verzio today: It’s called “war and love in Kabul”, which suits my newly discovered interest in world politics quite well. 

This weekend there was a national holiday in Hungary: The 1956 Revolution got 54 years old. There would have been a tour, and people on the streets, and music, and the prime minister. But I missed all of that. I had my own revolution going on: my stomach was revolting. All weekend long. So here I sat, unable to really do anything, and with only three more months to run around Budapest. Three months, of which two will be presumably too cold to run around. Good thing the wardrobes are cheap or free in most places. Thanks to my revolting belly, I went on a doctor hunt this morning and, after calling about six different places, coincidentally ended up with the right kind of specialist. The man works for the Semmelweis University Hospital AND Danone AND still had time for me today. And he laughed. But that was okay. The cab-driver was caught taking a red traffic light on the way home, he explained to me that the fine was 100 000 forint. Which is a lot of money. He laughed. I guess that was also okay. 

Walking through Budapest turns out to be not only very scenic, but often also a lot faster than public transport. True, I can blame that on the small bubble of downtown that we’re moving in most of the time, but it’s a good bubble inside the boundaries of tram 4 and 6.

This evening Senia and I took this tram to get to the next metro station, hopped on M3, missed a stop and walked from Deak Ferenc Ter to our destination: A Jurassic Park movie night. Needless to say, after the first two of the stunning series we were sort of over it and decided to go home, considering there are midterms coming up and all sorts of other excuses. So for our way home, we were quite easy off: night busses leave Astoria every ten minutes or so, and they’d shove us almost to our front door. But we decided to walk, burning off a few of the calories we just planted with peanuts, chips, pizza and whatnot.

Walking through Budapest is great. Although, at night, a little boring. In any case, we passed by a sleeping street person, and I turned my head, noticing something stuck out of the trash bin a bit behind him. It was a leg. A leg in cast, well, without the leg, I hope, but just the cast. I hope. I turned my head further and noticed a figure in the shadow of the corner. I assume, and this is just my interpretation of the situation, that he has something to do with the leg. I was about to say that he did not have a leg. This was also what I thought first. But now it doesn’t make sense to have plaster without a leg. Reel back. Jurassic Park. The leg. Figure in the dark. Creepy.

The rest of the walk was admittedly unspectacular. The homeless guy who lives in front of the supermarket in our street was sleeping where he usually sits and for the rest it was remarkably quiet for a Wednesday night. A leg. Seriously. 

(by the way, Mum: we were five people, so there's absolutely nothing to worry about)

By now, undoubtedly, it is fall. Meteorological, seasonal, visible. We saw the first traces when we found chestnuts on Margit Sziget, and soon thereafter, leaves started to cover the pavements. Leaves from trees we hadn’t even noticed yet because they were hidden behind fences and walls, away from the street, so as not to ruin the urban outlook of Budapest. When my brother visited last weekend, autumn showed his colder shoulder, with bright sunshine, making it impossible to dress right. We spent these days sightseeing. Freezing in the aisles of Ecseri Fleamarket on the city’s outskirts, and enjoying the sun outside, where the stands were empty because it was Friday. Ecseri is probably best and most impressive on the weekends, but the glimpses we saw, the old clothing, street signs, military relicts, toys, lamps, furniture, post cards, cameras, watches, were impressive to ravel through. Not to forget the 20-minute bus ride. It’s hard to believe that you’re still in Budapest when you see the small houses, the fields and factories.

We saw more of the Soviet memory in the House of Terror – where first the Nazis took camp and were executed a few years later when the Soviets arrived and took over the mansion. Right there in Andrassy Utca where I found a paperclip, this beautiful wide road.  It gives me shivers to believe how many people died in the basement of this house. It gives me shivers to think about the city in ruins after the war and during the 1956 revolution.

When we were bathing at Szechenyi afterwards, all this seemed so unreal. A people that spend their time reminiscing and playing chess in a body-tempered pool surrounded by cheerful yellow and white squiggles, how did they get through this? How did they bring up the anger to revolt?

What I like about autumn is its smell. The air smells chilly, and fresh, and just somewhat different from September. It’s not downright cold, just chilly, and although it’s only October, I had a lot of forralt bor – hot wine – already. Yesterday the sky was grey, anticipating the rain I woke up to this morning, but it was nice out. It wasn’t too cold and I walked to Astoria. Oddly enough, the circle in which I move around the city appears to become smaller, but I blame it on the shortcuts I find through the mess of streets downtown.  Later, Denis and Tim took me to the Corvinus Campus in Buda, to a flower exhibition. Under the sturdy clouded skies, the discolored trees in the arboretum seemed almost to be fluorescent, and the leaves glowed in the most beautiful shades from dark green over yellow to bright pink and red. Gellért hill is not a green spot on the other side of the river anymore. It’s bursting with color. It’s fall. 

Chloe organized a D.I.Y. pub crawl tonight, and with about 25 people we saw two great bars/restaurants within three hours. I'm continuously surprised by the size of the bars here that look so tiny from outside. The first, I forgot the name, was close to Blaha Lujza Ter, and turned out to be big enough for all of us if not cozy because we had to sit on the uncool side of the bar. The cool side of the bar looked amazing, the menu looked amazing and we decided to go with a smaller group sometime to have dinner there. 
Our longish quest for Most!-bar was absolutely worth it. The wallpaper is pictures of cassettes and bookshelves, the service was good and in general, it was a comfortable despite large place. Also, it's close to Instant and Piaf, which is a pretty good precondition to start with!

On Thursday, it was extremely cold. Schekeb and I had just left an Iranian kebabshop and were on our way home, when I found a paperclip. I found it and stopped, tangled in in-ear headphones and cables and picking it up from the cold ground. It was in Lónyay Utca, in the street where I live, pretty close to the new University building. After meeting the English Club at the Trapez and eating something there, we were still hungry and searching for a kind of fries-stand on Raday Utca that one of the English teachers at Trapez recommended. By the time we found it, they had closed their kitchen. So we ended up at the Iranian place, whose owner smoked a water pipe while we were eating our falafel and kebab surrounded by paintings of Arabian and Persian beauties and unibrowed belly dancers. When we finally walked home, Schekeb put on Beethoven’s Für Elise on his Ipod. It was odd and somehow magical, to walk down this dark, dirty and dusty cold street with the sound of piano in my head. Usually, there are construction noises, cars, people shouting, sirens. Now it was dark, and the silence was only crossed out by Beethoven’s song. And right that moment, I found the paperclip. We weren’t too far from the University and the dormitories, so it was no surprise to find one there. I smiled, Schekeb didn’t understand my excitement about the piece of metal and we walked home to drink a cup of tea. When I walked down Lónyay again yesterday, I heard the song again, playing in my mind. It suits this street oddly well.