Monday 23 August 2010

before and after

On Sunday afternoon I did a bit of sightseeing in Budapest, with a local guide—a couchsurfer who had stayed with me when he visited my city of residence back in November. Today I posted some of my photos to Facebook, and included the snippet of information that he’d shared with me—apparently all of the bridges connecting the cities of Buda and Pest were destroyed during WWII, but one of them was re-built in the same style as before the war. This is my photo of that bridge:





And this is a link he shared with me of how it looked in 1946.

Seeing his link had me nearly in tears. War is something of which I can never approve, and photos like that really bring home how truly dangerous they are. But the compare and contrast from the destruction then, to the beauty that is now is a tribute to human nature and our ability to sweep up and start over. May we never lose that ability, may we never cause others to need practice that skill, and may we never need practice that skill for reasons of our own causing.

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