Eto ne fotografia...: Of ice and the river

The Danube, looking north from the Lanchid. Feb. 13, 2012, 3 p.m.

I've become unusually fascinated by the flow of ice down the Danube, which appeared one morning earlier this month. Multiple times a day I'll spend several minutes staring out the window at the ever-shifting mosaic outside, which accomplishes the nifty zen trick of helping you focus and relax at the same time.

When we first moved over to Pest in January, the whole winter had been mild enough that it felt like a familiar New England early November. But in a few weeks, and rather suddenly, a remarkably stable weather pattern appeared that has only just now started to break. A huge pocket of high pressure lurking over the Baltic Sea, rotating Siberian air into central and Eastern Europe, coupled with a low pressure system over the Mediterranean that pushed up moisture every now and then.

We've had a few snowfalls, and the temperature hasn't budged higher than the mid-20s in weeks. I haven't noticed a real pattern to the ice -- at first it came in slushy flecks, at its height it including enormous sheets of white floating by.

I don't know much about the seasons here, so I don't understand what the reality of a Hungarian winter is and what is just the usual seasonal whining. At the height of the cold snap, I saw one news outlet run a story comparing the situation -- favorably, I think -- to the winter of 1987. That was when a sharp cold in mid-January cost hundreds of lives across Europe, severely taxed energy resources (I read that the price of a barrel of oil reached a jaw-dropping $19!), and caused Danube water levels to drop to dangerous levels.

To give you a sense of what it was like here in Hungary, I found a BBC Monitoring Service report from Jan. 17, 1987, which perhaps captures the real spirit of life under late state socialism:

The Central Committee and the government greatly appreciate the work which leaders and workers, the collectives and individuals have performed in the struggle against the current extraordinary winter. This was stressed by Janos Kadar, Party General Secretary, on his visit to the headquarters of the National Technical Development Commission. He stated that the country had moved as a single unit in overcoming the difficulties. One could mention numerous examples of how transport workers had stood their ground, and could only express one's appreciation to all those who had gone to work on foot. There is more than one collective such as the Szekesfehervar plant at Ikarus where workers wish to make up for the four days of lost production on their first four free days, said Janos Kadar.

But anyway... this afternoon I took a walk over the Lanchid and nearly froze my fingers off taking pictures of the ice. When you are standing on the pylons looking down, there is a remarkable sound when the ice crashes into the pillars, then slosh and bump around before being carried away.

Here are a few more pics. There'll probably be more before winter is done...