Visiting Hungary and Poland

I travelled to Hungary at night, so I could arrive in Budapest in the morning. I didn’t travel there just because of the concept of the drawing and painting workshops, but also to relax and have fun in the Hungarian capital where people from different continents and countries were gathered thanks to the summer. We met at a hostel in the city centre, from which you can access both the cultural attractions in the old town and the galleries and museums of Budapest.

As is customary for the type of hostels I usually book when abroad, this one was also the kind that had dorms and the kind where you pay the lowest price per night and then use the facilities accordingly. The facilities where there aren’t really any rules and everyone goes with the flow.

Many various initiatives developed during the very busy week in the Hungarian capital, and it helped me and my friends make both planned and spontaneous ideas real. This opened up new possible routes, without which things that had to happen wouldn’t have happened. Unforgettable experiences gradually called for the next destination, where I was guided by the need to document the paintings in the museums in Kraków and by continuing the recorded draft of the concept started in Budapest, which would have a coherent whole consisting of two countries, Hungary and Poland.

The journey to Poland took me through Slovakia and to the city of Kraków where I booked a hostel for a week. My plan urged me to arrive there three days earlier than my two friends from the United States, who had been travelling around Europe. They were about to end their trip in Poland, their twentieth European country, where they concluded the whole journey and then returned to their home in California, on the other side of the Atlantic.

Kraków, with its typical Polish atmosphere, created countless magical impressions and left a mark on each of us who had been searching for happiness in Poland. Calm summer nights in the second half of July stirred up pleasant feelings and reflected the features of the city’s town planning as well as the diversity of its architecture and the style periods reaching far into the past. The historical old town that was unknown, yet so familiar, called for social gatherings each evening, its zeitgeist filling visitors with everything one did in Kraków’s city centre.

An important part of travelling to foreign lands is a good book, so it became a habit for me to explore the nearest bookshops and antique shops upon arrival in a foreign city, and search for literature that fills up my time when I return to Slovenia. And so I bought three literary works in Hungary: two titles in an antique shop at the end of the street near the hostel, namely the work of Sigmund Freud – 9 Case Histories II: ‘Rat Man’, Schreber, ‘Wolf Man’, Female Homosexuality and the work of Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer – 3 Studies on Hysteria, while the museum shop offered me the work of Ágnes Szigethi – Old French Painting, 16–18th Centuries.

I was surprised by two bookshops, and I couldn’t resist the selection of the books that were on offer, so I bought five titles. The old antique shop in the old town provided me with a work of Erich Fromm – Beyond the Chains of Illusion, and American Bookstore with The Long 1980s, Constellations of Art, Politics and Identities, the work of Jay Calderin – The Fashion Design, Jesse Day’s Line Color Form, The Language of Art and Design and Steven Heller’s Design Literacy, Understanding Graphic Design.

I keep a wonderful memory of both Budapest and Kraków, thanks to their interesting bookshops, excellent cuisine, great club scene, kind people and surprisingly inspiring hustle and bustle that merges an individual with the whole and lives the life of a large city in modern Europe. It is exactly these European lives of large cities that justify the diversity of trends, where crowds of people try to follow the global trend of way of life, though the latter is defined by the culture and tradition of the nation that’s trying to continue to understand its ancestors and preserve its national identity and character.

The visited galleries and museums

• Magyar Nemzeti Galéria/Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest – Hungary
• Műcsarnok/Kunsthalle, Institution of the Hungarian Academy of Arts, Budapest – Hungary
• Szépművészeti Múzeum/Museum of Fine Arts Budapest, Budapest – Hungary
• Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie/National Museum Kraków, Kraków – Poland
• Muzeum Narodowe w Krakowie/Sukiennice Museum, Kraków – Poland
• Wawel Zaginiony – Zamek Królewski na Wawelu/Wawel Royal Castle – State Art Collection, Kraków – Poland