Győr station is really quite stylish in a 1950s way. I took most of these photos while I was waiting around bored for my delayed train back to Austria.
Category: Travel
Draught excluders of Győr
There were a lot of decrepit old wooden windows in Győr old town. Here’s some of the various designs of draught excluders I saw.
Győr at night
The Danube at night
Street Signs of Győr
There’s also lots of vintage street signs in Győr. This one says “fabric dyeing and dry cleaning”.
Győr, Hungary
After working in Vienna for a week I headed off on the train to Győr in Hungary. It’s the regional capital of NW Hungary, and exactly halfway between Vienna and Budapest. I’d never been there before, and it was an easy train journey from both Vienna and the tiny village on the Austria-Hungary border where my next work assignment was.
Street Signs of Vienna
Vienna has strong rent controls for shops, meaning that many of them are in the same location for decades, leading to lots of vintage shop signs around town (along with stylish new ones like the brewery one above). Here’s a selection of different ones I spotted on this trip.
Architekturzentrum Wien
I also visited Vienna Architecture Centre- I’d never been inside this small museum before, but the entry was thrown in free with the bundle ticket I bought for the other exhibitions.
Türkenschanzpark
About 15 minutes walk from the school I was working at in Vienna, and next door to the University of Life Sciences was Türkenschanz Park
Vienna Academy of Fine Art
On a rare day off in Vienna I went to the Open Studio day at the Vienna Academy of Fine Art. This is the top art school in Austria, and also the same institution that famously rejected Hitler twice for his lack of creativity. The studios are in this impressive building, the Semperdepot, which was originally built to store theatre scenery and props.
Kunstautomat
Das Geht Sich Gut Aus
I’ve been in Vienna and now a tiny village on the Austro-Hungarian border for the last few weeks. Here’s what I’ve been listening to.
Kunsthalle Wien – Nina Vobruba/Malte Zander + Time is Thirsty
The Kunsthalle Wien holds temporary exhibitions- I caught the last day of this show. It definitely isn’t the best thing I’ve seen there- I’ve previously been to blockbuster Basquiat, Haring and Švankmajer shows there, but it was included in the Combi-ticket I bought for the other museums, so I made sure to see it.
This Means Nothing To Me?
I’ve been back in Vienna since Saturday, but I was busy at the annual work conference. Last year was the first in a decade that I didn’t spend any time in Vienna, and that was strange. Vienna is a very big and grand capital city for a small country of six million sparsely spread mountain people, a remnant of the days when it was the capital of the whole Austro-Hungarian empire, covering Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia and parts of Romania and Poland.
Slovak National Gallery
The Slovak National Gallery was also open late- it was free that day too because they were changing the exhibitions and only two rooms were open. From the website it seems like there’s a lot of interesting stuff in the museum, and it’s a pity I didn’t get to see it, but I enjoyed the small section I did get to see.
The Little Mole
Zdeněk Miler was a Czech illustrator and animator best known for his character the Little Mole (Krtek or Krteček).
Overnight in Bratislava
I’m working in Austria for the next few weeks. I’ve been visiting for the last ten years to run school workshops. You spend a week in a local school running drama, creative writing, and sometimes art or cookery classes as an English immersion programme. Every week you’re at a different school.
I normally take my DSLR, and sort out the photos afterwards, but I couldn’t find what I’d done with the charger. My phone has a very decent camera though, so I’m going to use that and post them as I go. I’ve become increasingly frustrated with the way the FB and Instagram algorithms decide what people see and in what order. Everything’s jumbled up and got no context or order, and it makes seeing travel photos particularly frustrating. So they’re just going here, where they stay in chronological order and in context.
Versailles Xpro- Summer of 2005
I’ve recently scanned around 60 old rolls of film, which I’ll gradually post. These are some photos of the palace of Versailles taken on some extremely expired slide film. At the time I worked in a photo lab, and ended up with a huge bag of all the expired film from the shop for about £20, and also got free development as a perk. Half-melted and degraded Kodak slide film + Olympus XA2 camera, cross-processed as C41.
Glasgow Monochrome
Innsbruck
Here’s some more old films I scanned- this time of Innsbruck from two years ago. Standard Ilford HP5 with a 70s Pentax SLR.
Le Haut Boulay / Fomapan 400 review
Some photos of a place called Le Haut Boulay in Northern France near where my mum lives. I have never seen a soul in the hamlet. There’s a handful of houses and the roadside shrine, and that’s it.
It was really a test roll for the film. Fomapan 400- a very cheap black and white film from the Czech Republic.
Robert Smith’s Cabbages
A couple of years ago I went down to Aldwick, near Bognor Regis for the summer to house-sit a relative’s house. I ended up being stranded there due to a lengthy train strike. Robert Smith of the Cure is probably the only famous local resident. The owner of one of the local shops told me where he lived, and I went along to see it once out of curiosity. The house was dull and expensive looking, but the beach it stands next to was much more Robert Smith like, with windswept shingle like Dungeness and rare sea cabbages. I never bothered to look at Robert Smith’s house again, but I made many trips to the beach because I liked it so much. I was usually the only person there.
60s slides: Costiera Amalfitana
Here’s some more 60s tourism slides from my grandparents’ house (you can see others here). This time from the Amalfi Coast in southern Italy, now a UNESCO site. Again I have posted all 36 images. It looked pretty much the same when I was there about 10 years ago, minus the annoying coach party of loud Texans who kept appearing everywhere you looked and complaining there was no Taco Bell and you had to walk places. Further along the coast in Sorrento I bought a very fancy waffle-knit towel that still serves me well for travelling. The shop assistant seemed very confused that I wasn’t buying a whole matching set of them like the majority of their customers. Afraid I could only afford one small one.
60s slides of Herculaneum
When clearing out my grandparents’ house a couple of years ago I found seven packets of these 60s tourist slides of various places around the Mediterranean. I’ve been scanning and restoring them. First up, these from Herculaneum.
Herculaneum is a smaller coastal town near Pompeii that was also destroyed by the volcano. It’s not as well known, but there are some magnificent villas there in a similar but smaller archaeological park to the one you can visit at Pompeii.
Dachau
On my way back from the Tyrol, I stayed in Munich en route to the airport, and visited the Dachau concentration camp museum- it was the first Nazi concentration camp and served as a template for many of the others…
Schwartzsee
A short train ride or couple of miles walk outside Kitzbühel is the Schwartzsee (“black lake”). It’s full of minerals washed down from the mountains that give it the glassy black effect…
Kitzbühel
So here’s a couple of assorted photos of Kitzbühel town. It’s a ski resort in the Austrian Tyrol, about equidistant between Salzburg, Innsbruck and Munich…
Hahnenkamm
In July I went to Kitzbühel in Austria for work. I was there to run a workshop in the local middle school, and the mayor gave me and my three co-workers tickets for the local ski lift…
Büren-Harth
Here’s some more photos from Germany. From Harth in Nordrhein-Westfalen to be more precise. It’s a small village in the Sauerland, a scenic forest region about a hundred miles east of Cologne, popular for hiking and cycling.
Düsseldorf
I spent most of August in Germany, teaching some school workshops and going to Documenta art fair along the way. My first assignment was in rural Nordrhein-Westfalen. The agency has a tendency to book you on flights at brutal times early on a Sunday, so instead I booked my own flight to Cologne on a Friday evening, and claimed it back off them. I have been to Cologne loads of times, and my colleagues were flying into Düsseldorf, which I had never visited. So I decided to stay in Düsseldorf, do a bit of sightseeing, and then meet up with the others before heading to the Sauerland.
Hobotnica
And to round off my stuff from Croatia, here’s some sketchbook notes from Zadar museum and Trogir. Hobotnica (pronounced hobotnitsa) is Croatian for octopus. It’s a good word.