The tower with a soul…19.
On 14/06/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
In place of an epilogue…
In writing this irregular story of our tower, I have now arrived to the present day. Writing the articles was an enriching experience and I hope those who have read my subjective account of our life will have enjoyed it and were not bored to tears. Of all the details perhaps it is the sphere that is the most interesting, the way I experienced those 27 years from the first excited steps to the rather sad present day finale. We loved to come to the airport and the tower to work, we thought of the place as our second home. By now this enthusiasm has completely evaporated and looking around me, I can see that this is true not only for an old, nostalgic tower controller like me. The young generation will never experience the freedom we enjoyed moving around the airport. Strangely, we were free under the previous regime and are now simple employees (slaves if you like) completely at the mercy of bureaucracy gone wild.
In any case, the first half of the year 2010 has produced two unusual events. It started in January, when winter finally became real winter again. We had snowfall and cold that had not been seen in the Carpathian Basin in years. Of course we have the appropriate story for this also from the archives of past years. Back then the operators of the airport boasted that no amount of snow could ever close down the airport. They could always keep at least one runway operational, they always had sufficient capacity to do that. Of course keeping the airport open was only one side of the coin, most aircraft could not depart on time anyway since passengers could not make it to the airport because of the snow on the access road!
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The tower with a soul… 18.
On 10/06/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
Approaching the present day…
What a strange folk we are, we Hungarians! We complain when we have to work with an obsolete system and when it is replaced with something new, we complain that we are forced to learn new tricks when we had actually grown used to the old ones. This was the situation with the introduction of the MATIAS system that followed Eurocat2000 and whose introduction was anything but smooth. As I heard from “inside”, the new system was simply too complicated for many an experienced colleague and they were actually quite happy to profit from the announced cut in personnel. They retired and my generation had a chance to follow them up in the Supervisor positions. Their place was in turn filled with new hires and those youngsters showed in short order that controlling the terminal area was not such a difficult task after all.
All of a sudden traffic became much more fluid and they turned aircraft on final with a flair never before seen. This was a revelation for us in the tower. Wow, it can be done like this also! We saw the change clearly since watching traffic being handled by the old guard we often shook our heads in amazement, especially when the odd aircraft flew all the way down to the town of Kecskemet for a bit of sightseeing as a result of being cleared for descent and turn to base leg far too late…
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The tower with a soul… 17.
On 07/06/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
We could have done it differently…
MP, my one time friend was appointed as the first director of Hungarocontrol, receiving his letter of appointment from the State Secretary for Transport (who has in the meantime moved to social work). I said one time friend because MP has also done his training in Riga and because, while he was still in the tower, we used to haunt the local pubs for a bit of professional chatting together, him, myself and two other colleagues who were also friends. On such occasions beer was not necessarily the most important element of the gathering, we did “work” in the form talking about the present as it was then and also about the future. Naïve that I was, I often though how nice it would be if the four of us would get a shot at making the world better.
With a bit of common effort we could have kept the “beat generation” at bay and our story would have been about the profession, pure and simple. Unfortunately this was not to be. Instead, some people managed to get ahead by individual, skilful maneuvering, bowing in to the whims of those who have gone before them.
I did not have a stomach for this and got my due punishment as a consequence. When the time came, another guy was picked for training as an approach controller and over the years it also became clear that I would be among the first ones to retire from the tower. The first one among those who had started work here that is.
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The tower with a soul… 16.
On 27/05/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
9/11 and other events of consequence.
11 September 2001 started like any other late summer day. Unlike most people, I do like September. The stifling heat of August is gone, allergens are also mostly gone, and so I breathe easier. So, for me fall is not a reminder of passing but of a new beginning. May be there are others who think the same… Anyway, on that fateful day we were on day-shift. One half of our group was working in the tower from 7 to 9, the other was downstairs having breakfast or just drinking coffee. Switching TV channels, they happened on a channel showing one of the World Trade Center towers in New York belching smoke from a gaping hole in its side. At first they thought they were watching an action movie, except that this was a news channel… Paying more attention they soon realized that this was no action movie, they were watching the real thing! A passenger aircraft flew into the very building I too had visited a few years back. Soon the news arrived also in the tower cab and it gave me the creeps followed by a feeling of emptiness in me. After 9 it was us who watched the news and saw the second plane crashing into the other tower. We were not even surprised… But in each of us the question arose: what now?? Aircraft were still coming and going at Ferihegy airport but the news spread like wildfire and was soon everywhere. With this, a new chapter was opened in the life of the airport. A very dark chapter.
The years since have convinced me that the whole story was not what we at first thought it was, or rather how others tried to make us see it. I have been to the part of the world where they thought the enemy was hiding and getting to know the people there, I started having my doubts. I am afraid that behind this whole horrible event one will find capitalist interests and the push for world hegemony. What better proof do you need than the fact that since the change of leadership in the US, there are far fewer terrorist acts in the world.
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The tower with a soul… 15.
On 21/05/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
Exciting times and more progress
The first decade after the change of the political system in Hungary brought home the realization that Hungarians had a peculiar interpretation of democracy. Instead of making use of opportunities, they immediately started abusing them. They interpreted freedom as being a license to do anything with laws being just a necessary evil which one did not have to observe but rather find cracks to avoid them. Slowly but surely the country slipped into a chaotic state and Ferihegy airport was no different.
Each of the specialized services gained a lot of independence and they started to issue their own rules and procedures, most of which were of course in contradiction with what the others were doing. This was the reason why the tower also had to start negotiations with the other services and to develop common positions and provisions. Obviously, this was far too much work for a single tower boss and so the Aerodrome Control Centre was established under the leadership of SP. This unit incorporated the tower division, the met observer division and the engineering division. The tower division had its own boss in the person of GC. So it was SP and GC who started the negotiations at the end of 2000 with the other services, including the ramp and the airport coordination service.
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The tower with a soul… 14.
On 11/05/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
Finally, real progress
For this chapter I had to solicit a bit of outside help. It looked like I too remembered old memories better than recent ones. Misi Kurucz was kind enough to help me by sketching the most important events in the life of the tower that came to pass during his tenure as tower chief. My heartfelt gratitude goes to him for this.
Misi was appointed tower chief in 1997. He took the room once occupied by professor SGY and set out alone (!) to fight an uphill battle. It was clear even then that getting all the red-tape done would not be an easy task. He could count on the tower shift supervisors but in turn he had to wrestle with his management to force a bit of progress. That his efforts were not in vain is amply demonstrated by the tower cabin as it is now. A lot of things had to be changed and modernized so that we may work in a more up-to-date environment. The renovations brought months of noise and dirt so our life was not easy either. But we survived and so did the aircraft we handled during this difficult period and work in the new cabin was much more pleasant. For example, the consoles were lowered so we had a much better view of the field. We got new, flat panel monitors on which we could follow traffic much better. When the image processing of the ground control radar was digitized, all movements on the airport became easily visible. For example, at the tower control position both runways were shown simultaneously on two separate images.
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The tower with a soul… 13
On 06/05/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
Ten years on the job
The old approach unit...
Ten years on the job! I can say that the first ten years passed quickly but on occasion time seemed to be crawling. Under the previous protocols, someone with a 10 year old license would have already made it to approach control. I read somewhere not so long ago that hires in the “beat generation” in the 60s and 70s became tower controllers almost off the street and approach controllers after a mere five years. This was considered normal back then. Work in the old tower coupled to low traffic did not demand a lot of professional skill. In that system it was logical to have the beginners start in the tower and then get promoted to approach control.
Things changed with the new tower, after all, the area of the airport increased threefold with all that this entailed. Traffic had to be organized across many more taxiways and operating two runways also required more concentration and experience. This was also the reason why it looked like a good idea for the approach controllers to come out to the tower one by one for a stint of a few months. As I mentioned before, this idyllic state of affairs did not last long and the old practice of promoting tower controllers with the most experience to become approach controllers with no reverse flow of any kind continued. Unfortunately the tower complement did not get new hires either so our numbers shrunk while those of the approach unit swelled. This meant of course that after a time we could no longer be “promoted” as the approach control unit had more than enough controllers and with no reverse flow, the average age of the tower controllers started to climb inexorably. We were getting old… This had the consequence that soon controllers in the tower were no longer just bright young titans, we too matured into ripe stingrays with muddy eyes. The relationship between the two units also changed. We, tower people no longer took the abuse lying down that was regularly meted out by the approach controllers and through many confrontations we forced them to accept our unit as their equal.
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The tower with a soul… 12
On 27/04/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
From shared lunches to more restrictions
As the years passed and we approached the tenth anniversary of being on the job, contact with other colleagues of my age group tapered off. Some of them went to other shifts or even other control units and this did not help of course. But on the few occasions we met, talk was no longer about girls or the pub but our respective aptitude in using Pampers properly. In other words, each of us was busy building a family and this left little time for anything else. Folks in the same shift tended to stick together though and common programs only strengthened this unity. For example (and this was back in the times before the political changes took place) we were members of a so called “brigade”. Sometimes we attended the May Day parade together but the common outings and excursions were the most memorable. One of the most successful trips was to Ocseny. Eight of us crammed into two small Polski Fiat’s, no mean feat! An old friend, VK welcomed us at the Ocseny airport where after we took turns to fly in a small plane above the Gemenc forest. After
each of us consuming a huge portion of “marhaporkolt” (beef prepared in a not quite goulash mode) and some excellent wine from the Szekszard region, it was even more difficult to get into the little cars… but we made it home safely.
On another occasion we were helping at the building site of one of our colleagues. Back then people built their own houses with help from friends. We got immersed in shifting bricks so much that we clean forgot that the group, in its totality, was due for night shift. In the end we reported two hours late and inserted the plugs of our headsets to the loud and forceful cursing of the day crew finally released to go home.
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A tower with a soul…11
On 12/04/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
Small planes, small airports
The change of political system in Hungary was the main driver behind the presence of an increasing number of small aircraft, more and more people chose this way to visit the country. Since there was only one international airport, Ferihegy in Budapest, every plane had to land there to complete the immigration and customs formalities before being allowed to fly to their actual destination. The Air Traffic and Airport Administration (LRI), recognizing the possibilities, soon established air traffic services at the small Balaton Kiliti airport near Siofok, the capital of the Balaton Lake district. We started receiving planes there from the fall of 1989. At first our traffic consisted only of the foreign planes flying over from Budapest and the few planes in Hungarian ownership. This meant just a few planes a day and we were seriously bored most of the time. We spent the hours from opening to closing of the airport in a small wooden barrack and the only excitement was provided by the police helicopters which came to visit occasionally.
Scarce traffic or not, this new life around small aircraft had a charm and novelty for us. Working at the big Ferihegy airport we talked to the pilots only via the radio, at Balaton Kiliti we got to meet them in person. A whole new world opened for us and I for one liked this direct contact very much. I might say it was a much better feeling being able to go out to the plane and do a bit of hell-raising if the pilot did something silly. At Ferihegy this was impossible, everything happened in a much more regimented manner.
Balaton Kility from the air with Lake Balaton in the background
Yes I liked this rural life and was among the first who applied also for the 1990 season. By May of that year, LRI had a kind of terminal built at Kiliti for an exorbitant price. Since they never bothered to consult us, this new building turned out to be of doubtful value. The tower cab on the top was a hothouse in the summer and by midday everyone had to escape or risk a heat stroke. We soon gave up experimenting with that thing and simply stayed downstairs, working from what was meant to be the reserve radio room. It had a terrace and we talked to the planes from there. The building also housed our living quarters, so for four days at a stretch we usually did not set foot in the outside world. This was both good and bad. Tired by evening, we usually stayed put when in fact a bit of night swimming in the lake would have been a good thing.
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The tower with a soul… 10
On 29/03/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
New politics, new hopes
The miracle happened in 1989-90. Hungary became independent, a sovereign State with free elections and a multiparty parliamentary democracy. That this also brought with it the darker sides of capitalism did not concern anyone back then. An omission we came to regret later. In short order we had to realize that it was not Paradise that had arrived but unemployment and the world of capital. The cadres who had a comfortable place under the old regime transformed themselves into capitalists, flashing in new guises while they divided the spoils of the transformation among themselves. In other words, the old party apparatchiks allowed the peaceful transition into a new system because they saw a stable future for themselves. They did co-opt a few new faces to make the rest of the population believe that a change had indeed taken place but the old cadres were very much present in the leadership of all the new parties.
There was only one good thing about it all, the Russian occupation force left the country (of course nowadays there are many more Russians in the country but they are tourists).
Completing the Russian withdrawal
The trouble was, in their new-found freedom the Hungarians dismantled most everything that actually worked well under the previous regime, something they should have thought over a bit more. We found out that our nation is better at destroying than building things.
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The tower with a soul… 9
On 18/03/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
Parties then and now
As I said earlier, the tower was standing in the middle of the prairie. This was both an advantage and a disadvantage. Very little of the dirt and mud throwing that went on in the main building actually reached the tower. At the same time most decisions were made without our involvement, we had practically no chance to influence our own fate. You will also remember that the tower had no appointed boss and some of the division heads just used their positions to climb higher and avoid ever having to come back to the tower. But there were other colleagues also who worked hard to attain prominence via ways other than their professional performance. They were focusing on a party career…
They had two great ways of avoiding work, the Communist Youth Federation (KISZ) and the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (MSZMP). Both
organizations had their offices in the main building and they held their meetings during working hours, mainly at times of highest traffic… Members used the services of Sanyika (you remember him? Sanyika with the Barkas body…) to ride to the main building and they attended the meetings as long as it took for the busiest traffic to subside. Then they returned, exhausted and worked without much enthusiasm until it was time to go home. The saying “errors will only be made by those actually working” had its origins in this strange setup. Since those party members always managed to abstain from heavy work, it was us who were left to fill in for them that made the smaller and bigger mistakes that are unavoidable even at the best of times. Guess who were eventually designated as poor controllers in the eyes of top management?
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The tower with a soul… 8
On 09/03/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
Airport – the book and the real thing
In order for you to understand this part, we need to go back to the early days, when the tower was commissioned… We have to look back to those days because that is where the never ending problems have started. What follows here is conjecture on my part, but as they say, where there is smoke, there is fire…
In 1983, the year the tower started in live operations, we only had two television channels, both broadcasting in Hungarian. Under the regime then in power, movies from the West arrived on the “good” side of the iron curtain with a delay of several years. This was the reason why the film Airport made in 1970 from Arthur Hailey’s hit novel, was shown on Hungarian television 13 years after its premier, in 1983. This had far reaching consequences for us in the tower…
With there not being much of a choice, half the country was glued to the tube watching how the good folk of Lincoln went to protest aircraft noise, in spite of the heavy snow. Many of those who saw the film felt immediate sympathy with the Lincoln protesters. Before that movie I had never seen anyone protesting aircraft noise in Hungary, not even at places like Tokol where Mig-21 jet fighters blasted over their heads almost every minute. Call it a coincidence, but after hand-over of the new runway, people living around Ferihegy airport started protesting in much the same way they saw it in the movie. Why couldn’t Arthur Hailey write about ants or the underground instead of airports? The consequence was that take-offs from 31R and landings on 13L were immediately restricted. In other words, we lost an approach direction even before we started using it.
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The tower with a soul… 7
On 22/02/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
The great escape and some unintended consequences
With the future of the tower work no longer being really promising, a lot of the younger guys “escaped”, some of them going all the way to Canada! When three of them left within weeks of each other, we had no other choice but to reorganize the shifts so that each still had the required complement of bodies. I had to move to another shift, the first such move which was followed by no fewer than ten shift changes in the following 25 years.
I spent three years in the original shift when the orders came to move. This meant saying good-bye to my friend Geza with whom we weathered the difficulties of the first few years. It also meant starting in a new group composed of people I had never met before. But I tried to look at the bright side of things: new group, new people, new customs, things that can actually make such a change exciting in everyday practice. And excitement there was aplenty. I saw the sour faces of the others who were also forced to change shifts and this made me even more determined not to make the same mistake. In the end I found myself settling in quite well into what was then Shift B. I was glad to see that there were also humans in that group and even while the days passed with a bit less merriment than before, it wasn’t so bad at all.
As it turned out, my settling in was even more successful than I realized… I met my future wife in Shift B. She was a Flight Data Assistant in the Approach Control Unit. I will not dwell too long on this part of the story, let me juts say that I experienced first-hand the wisdom of the saying: don’t ever hunt domestic rabbits. The only joyful outcome of that particular exercise is my daughter who is now 22 and with whom we continue to have a very close father-daughter relationship.
Everyone and no one in charge
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The tower with a soul… 6
On 15/02/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
A ship without a skipper
The first two-three years in the life of the new tower passed in the fever of newness and building experience. For us newbie’s everything was new by definition but even the older colleagues had to get used to the numerous new taxiways and the methods of using two runways. But everyone was enthusiastic about their work. Even the approach controllers who were attached to us for a few months at a stretch seemed to enjoy themselves. They discovered in short order that there was work to be done even in the tower and aerodrome controllers did more than just sit around the place. Slowly, very slowly a vision for a possible future started to take shape in which we saw ourselves as approach controllers coming out to the tower for regular rotations as a matter of course… What a nice dream this was!
When SG left, the dream went with him. As a young guy I had no idea why he opted to go back and once again work as a simple approach controller. I assumed the tasks and problems to be solved were simply too much for him and his health was also less than perfect, more then enough reasons for not wanting to stay as the tower boss.
His departure was a watershed event and it marked the start of the darkest period in the history of the tower. We were cast adrift, without leadership and things took a direction that was anything but European. There was nobody left to represent our interests unless you count the few division chiefs stationed in the main building who did occasionally show their faces in the tower to enquire how things were. But there was no point in telling them about our problems. By the time they negotiated the 6 kilometer distance back to their offices, they had forgotten everything we said. Once back behind their desks, they were immediately issued some kind of top priority matter to solve and so our petty problems always ended up falling by the wayside.
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The tower with a soul… 5
On 10/02/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
Flying over the cuckoo’s nest
A really cute novelty was the cuckoo act. This was the art of working during the night shift while being in deep sleep at the same time. I did not have much of a need to spend whole nights wide awake before coming to ATC… I mean, even in the military when doing duty in a guard tower I was able to nap a little (my gosh, I have just divulged a military secret).
The system worked like this. At around 11 p.m., most of the people on duty would depart for the rest areas with only two persons, the cuckoos, staying in the tower cab. In those days almost all traffic was gone before 11 p.m., so two controllers were more than enough to keep their eye on things until 0600 in the morning. The two guys were designated cuckoo one and cuckoo two. Number one was expected to be awake and available at an instant’s notice while number two was the back-up. In theory. In practice things sometimes worked out very differently, as we will see later.
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The tower with a soul… 4
On 29/01/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
Wrestling with the “furniture”
The huge control panel for the various ground lights, like the taxiway lighting, was next to the ground controller’s console. The control
panel was teeming with various switches used to turn various sections of taxiway lights on and off. The panel was variously nicknamed Christmas tree and railway shunting-yard. The multitude of small LED’s presented an impressive picture when night fell. There was only one problem with this panel, and also the panel used to switch the runway lights… you could operate the switches only through a very specific movement of your hand, something that needed to be learned separately. Not infrequently, the first attempt had to be followed by a second one… For some colleagues the frustration was too much with the result that we had to call the maintenance crew to restore certain broken parts…
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The tower with a soul… 3
On 18/01/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
In memoriam…
Luckily, this subject can be kept short. Our tower is only 25 years old so most of us have not yet had the time to get old… Unexpected tragedies have also mercifully spared the tower crew with the only exception being KG, who left us prematurely. But he made his name originally as an area controller and was active in the tower only for the last few months of his career.
Our colleagues of the met office one floor down did not fare so well… In the 25 years we are talking about, several of their colleagues flew west
into the sunset. The first to go was Guszti, I can’t recall his full name any more. He was of Bulgarian origin but spoke Hungarian without an accent. He was a relaxed, quiet chap with a ready smile and he came up to the tower cab regularly to chat up on things. He was the last person you would expect to have a stroke.
Two decades later, two met guys transferred to the heavenly observation post almost at the same time. UZ was only a little older than me and he too had been in the tower right from the start. He was a section chief when the note came that his time was up. Though he never complained, it was evident that he went through great suffering before finally being released from duty in this world. Just a few months later KJ left us so suddenly, we all shivered at the news. He was my age and he was a guy who worked out regularly. He actually died while exercising…
Sanyika's original vehicle
I left the story of Sanyika to the last, not because it is less important but because it is so extraordinary. Sanyika was the permanent driver of the van allocated to the tower. He was a very interesting character, it was impossible not to like him. It was his duty to transport us all over the airport, from the personnel entrance to the tower, from the tower to the company restaurant and to the offices in Terminal 1. He drove some 300 km per day, the Barkas van sort of becoming part of his body in the process. He was not at all offended when we started calling him our Centaur, part Barkas, part Sanyika… Well, Sanyika the upper part, Barkas the lower… you get the picture. In time, the old Barkas was replaced by a Ford minibus and the “operation” left Sanyika thoroughly unhappy. It just did not feel the same! And here comes the incredible part. Not much later, he passed away while waiting in the minibus. He died as he had lived… an inseparable part of our airport.
May peace be with you my dear friends, we will always remember you.
To be continued…
The tower with a soul… 2
On 11/01/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
Envy and other incomprehensible things
We were off to a turbulent start when the “old-timers” discovered that our starting salaries were the same as the salary of a controller after one year… we were certainly not to blame for this disparity but took all the flack nevertheless. Some of the more senior colleagues from the approach control unit had a few axes to grind also… it took a few years for me to find out why.
Flack or axes, we loved the tower work. There were four teams and I was in Team C, together with my friend ZG. This was a good arrangement, it was easier to make time pass together and we made fun out of just about everything. There were things most controllers hated to do. Like for instance having the flight progress strips torn off and inserted in their holders.
This had to be done the night before the strips would be used and the complement was for the whole day (we did not have just in time strip printing back then). So we started the night shift with attending to the strips while the “big” guys worked. Why they hated doing this so much was a mystery but for us it was a perfect opportunity for a fun competition. Who was the fastest at tearing the strips and inserting them individually into the holders? We timed everyone and we had everything from individual records to world records… Another activity apparently below the dignity of more senior colleagues was exchanging the soda bottles. The tower was supplied with a few crates of sparkling water and the empty bottles had to be taken to the terminal where they were exchanged for filled ones. This “catering” duty was just one more occasion to have some extra fun, for us anyway. Some colleagues back then would not be seen dead with one of those crates. Why I could never understand.
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The tower with a soul… 1
On 05/01/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
Preface
The "new" Ferihegy tower
Having held an Aerodrome Control rating in my ATC license and having actually worked as an aerodrome controller, I have this “thing” for the most spectacular air traffic services unit of them all, the Aerodrome Control Tower. Not only is their role vital in running airports efficiently, they are also for the most part magnificent architecture objects, lending their beauty to the whole of the airport they serve.
A particular tower in Europe is even closer to my heart than the rest. Although I started my career in the old tower at Budapest Ferihegy airport and never actually worked in the new one, I did contribute to the airport expansion project which included construction of the new tower as you see it to-day.
Reading the above, you will not be surprised to learn that it was no accident that Ferihegy Tower was the second in our series on the towers of the world. Why not the first? That is another story I might tell you in the future…
What you are reading here is a new series, based on informal chats I had with Lajos Molnar, an aerodrome controller who, unlike me, has been there in the tower at Ferihegy from day one. We talked about many things but the focus was always the tower… its people, its soul, its essence that makes it special for those who work there.
This is the story of a tower with a soul as told by Lajos Molnar who has been touched by that soul and whose soul is part of that tower.
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New series on Roger-Wilco. The tower with a soul…
On 31/12/2009, in The tower with a soul, by steve
If you enjoyed reading the sometimes incredible stories in Same Time, Same Place, Same Level…, keep your seatbelts fastened! The last part of Same Time having just been published, we are bringing you a new series under the title: The tower with a soul. This will be the story of the first 25 years in the life of the new control tower at Budapest Ferihegy airport.
Presented in several chapters covering the professional as well as the human interest aspects that characterized the first 25 years of the new tower, the series is not trying to be an official history of the edifice or the control unit it houses. It will be the picture as seen through the eyes of a controller who has been there right from the start. Factual, often moving, sometimes a tad subjective… but at all times a real life rendition of life in a tower with a soul.
Part 1 will be posted in the first week of January 2010.
