Zoltán | Andrássy road

“It wasn’t difficult to become a man from Pest, as I always had this identity besides the one in Battonya. I knew a lot about pop culture even when I was a school boy, I even know the catalog tracks of the records, I knew the concert reviews of magazines by heart, I could cite the Rock Year book ‘81 and though I lived 240 kilometres from Pest somehow I could visit relatives and then I bought records or it may have happened to be a pair of jeans… If I couldn’t go to a concert I read the review in Magyar Ifjúság (Hungarian Youth) the following week. In 1982 when I turned twelve we founded a punk band with my classmates and we put a kind of newsletter to every stairwell in the neighbourhood that the Sahara band has been founded. When it was decided in 1992 that I would move to Budapest for good, I knew the city well enough to get anywhere on foot. But the Buda side is still unknown area for me, I don’t like it, it’s not my world. Basically I’m tied to Terézváros, I moved to a flat in Andrásssy Avenue in the summer of 1996, from here I got to Bajza Street then to Dessewffy, I can tell from most of the shops what metamorphosis they have been through in the last 20 years. I go to the Authors’ shop and the Musicland record store in Almássy square almost every week and when I have something to do at Kávin I visit all the secondhand book stores in Múzeum Boulevard as there is always a writer who I have just found for myself, and I browse the shelves so enthusiastically as I was 15 years old. What I’m really proud of is that I can still search for records, old toys and books like a teenager.”