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A travel-focused Friday Five.

1. Have you ever stayed in a hostel? If so, where? Did you like it? If you haven’t stayed in a hostel, would you?

Yes, once, in Glasgow. We hated it. We’re clearly not the target audience.

2. What is your favourite airport that you’ve been to? Why?

Airports are such a liminal space, catering to a specific set of functions for a specific set of people, which makes them more or less all the same. But we were forced to hang out on the Nagoya airport when we missed our connecting flight to Japan from Helsinki. Despite the setbacks, I enjoyed the atmosphere and the shops there. They even had a display with dorodango that won at a competition!

3. What is the best museum you have visited on vacation?

Probably the Victoria & Albert museum in London. But that’s one of the big ones. Of the more obscure museums I’d have to go with the Edo-Tokyo museum because it shows so much of daily life in Edo.

4. Have you ever made friends while traveling whom you keep in touch with on a regular basis?

I don’t think I have.

5. Have you ever had a conversation with a seatmate on a plane?

In 1999 I flew to San Francisco for the SIGIR conference in Berkeley. I had a window seat. When we were flying over the west coast of the US, he started pointing out things to me. Turns out he owned a company making conduits for airconditioning and he had done a tour of Europe for the past six months in order to sell his product. He asked me where I was going, and he offered to bring me to the BART station with his car. In the end, he drove me to my hotel in Berkeley (I paid for the toll). So friendly to make such a detour for a total stranger, delaying his return home to his family after all those weeks.

And in 2015 we flew to Kyuushu (one of the main islands of Japan), leaving from Dusseldorf with a stop-over at Schiphol. We were sitting in the back in a row of 3 seats. The man sitting in the remaining chair also came from Dusseldorf and he was visiting his Japanese girlfriend in her hometown on Kyuushu. We compared notes (we were going for a tour of Kyuushu) and then we said goodbye as we arrived. And we met him again at the gate on Schiphol waiting to board for Dusseldorf — he had been in the exact same plane as us! We shared photos, it was fun.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.