András Földvári: Elmentem világgá (Run Away*) (21. Század Kiadó 2020)
András Földvári: Ez az én világom (This is My World*) (21. Század Kiadó 2021)
Many thanks to 21. Század Kiadó for sending me the books!
People can collect a lot of interesting things. András Földvári, for example, collects airports. His passion for flying and meeting with new things and other cultures is rooted in his childhood when he first started learning languages. At the age of 17, he flew with his parents for the first time to Poland, where he also fell in love with flying and the Polish language. After college, he worked at Malév, where, thanks to his language skills and kind nature, he made lifelong friendships all over the world and began to “gather” all the countries of the world.
Let’s get the numbers: he’s been to a total of 203 countries (even those that don’t officially exist!), visited 795 airports with the 2,650 flights, if we sum the distances he’s traveled so far, he’s gone around the Earth 113 times and could have reached the moon 11 times. According to his childhood friend, Zoltán Csépai, András Földvári’s “dearest cushion is the headrest of a seat and his natural habitat is the airport”.
In his first book, based on Verne, he tells 80 stories from his adventurous life, all of which can be linked to a journey. It is not a classic guidebook, it does not seek to present all the sights of each country, but rather captures the moods. Yet in every chapter, we can find something interesting that we have never heard anywhere before.
His second book focuses on people without whom the adventures would not have been possible. Unfortunately, the shutdown caused by the pandemic also affected András Földvári, but he was among the first people to be there on the slowly opening borders. We hope he will have many more adventures and will tell us about them in his next book.
*my translations
