The warmth is coming slowly still, and though I'm wearing a lighter jacket, I still wear more layers of clothes than I used to in Costa Rica. This still didn't keep me today at home - though I could have spent a day here picking up my recently ordered books (which take a bit more to arrive here than what would take Amazon.com to send me my books to Miami) - I decided to visit one of my old favorites: Empress Sissi's Gödöllő Royal Palace.
I didn't make much pictures, though I saw many, many beautiful things. The royal palace was marvelous as usual, but eerie as I was the only visitor, and the doors were closed, everything was so silent and even the cafeteria and the Gift shop were closed. It gave me the strange feeling of being a ghost in an ancient house, almost as if the Empress of her family, or anyone from her court could come running through the doors and though not see me, be scared by my presence there. The renovations have been going and teams of restaurators have been working hard on the palace, which was evident as I roamed the hallways and discovered new rooms open and more history to be shared.
This time around, I was deeply mesmerized by the trip itself. I took the HÉV, which is a kind of intercity train (something between a tramway and a train). From the window I watched the scenery slip away, run fast, and though my eye could catch the details, the lens of my camera couldn't. In this indecision dance Spring is making, I saw the forests I love so much - forest so different from what you seen in the tropical latitudes of the planet - still naked and ashen. Trees long and thin like the jeans clad legs of young girls stood up from a sickly pale soil that always shrinks my heart and make me painfully think about centuries of agriculture running the land anemic. Among those trees here and there some golden dry leaves drappes around the trunks looking much like gold flakes, such as the kind you find in some lesser wines.
The HÉV was too fast for my camera, but my eyes feasted on the floating golden flakes that brought a touch of patina, of Art Nouveau color to the endless lands of gray, think trunks and naked branches in wait for Persephone to step out of Hades and make the world merry and alive.
I carried to this trip a letter from my friend Trish, and read it evoking some of the most romantic notions of train traveling. Waring jeans and secluded from the world just with my music, staring out the window of a train and letting my thoughts linger, then breaking myself from the Sun setting mysterious and chilly behind the naked trees, filtering through a wire wrought branch lace and making the afternoon perfect, while my dark, chocolate eyes fall upon the envelop tucked in my bag, pull it out and allow myself to be absorbed by the world conjured by the letter of my friend.
Yes, life can be poetic, romantic and incredible, if we take the time to make it so.
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