AquaLangs

A recent visit to Costa Rica coincided with Holy Week and Juan Sanatmaria Day-a national patriotic holiday. The entire country shut down for days as religious and national celebrations took place. Adjacent to my hotel in San Jose was the La Soledad Church who organized a bit of pageantry for the event. I stumbled upon their procession and followed it to where several other church processions converged upon the Iglesia de Nuestra Senora de la Soledad, a large Cuban baroque church in central San Jose.

This woman is somewhat famous around Budapest for promoting laughter therapy. On this day she held her class on Margaret Island and is pictured here orchestrating a geriatric game of peek-a-boo.

I’ve always reverently respected Hungary’s contributions to the photographic community at large as some of the best photo artists, photojournalists, scientists, and cinematographers from the past 100 years are Hungarian. This includes a number I admire greatly like the Capa brothers (Robert and Cornell), Brassaï, László Moholy-Nagy, André Kertész, Dennis Gabor, József Petzvál and László Kovács to name a few off the top of my head without resorting to Google. What I was unaware of until I visited Budapest, is the Hungarian passion for the bicycle. As an avid cyclist and cycling advocate, I was stunned to witness their Critical Mass bike ride. In NYC, depending on the season, our version of the monthly rally only attract a few hundred to a couple thousand participants. The same event in Budapest pulls in 50-80,000 riders! Instead of sullen monthly NYC protest rides, the Hungarians have two peaceful and festive rides every year to overlap with Earth Day in the spring, and International Car-Free Day in the fall.

This very adept trials rider, who could give Jeff Lenosky a run for his money, was one of the many cycling performers who took advantage of the closing-down of Andrassy Ut, a major thoroughfare through some of the most posh real-estate in Budapest. The nervous girl on the pavement was a volunteer pulled from the audience who scored a perspective of a bicycle most people don’t – from the underside. In this shot she could probably read the serial number off the bottom bracket!

As the world shrinks and more of us are granted greater access to this planet’s nooks and crannies, one finds that nearly every major city has a Chinatown district or neighborhood. As a result, I have found that I have to suffix any mention of my own Chinatown with the locale of New York City.

A few years ago when I was living in Juneau, Alaska, I worked with a kid who’s name was long forgotten by most of the restaurant and bar staff of the places he frequented daily. The lapse was a result of his steady diet of ceviche, a cocktail of raw fish and lemon juice, that he consumed as often as he could. So his meal of choice became his moniker.

While wandering the isolated roads in a unregistered pickup truck with a full cab of unlicensed drivers, we had to stuff Ceviche in the bed of the truck. Like coroners, we covered him with a sheet as it is illegal to transport a person in the back of a pickup (nevermind the legal issues presented by us in the cab who shouldn’t have been driving in the first place).