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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.

While I’m writing posts based on prompts, I might as well put another Friday Five in.

1) What’s the weather like where you are right now?

We’re currently on day 3 of a week-long heat wave, with temperatures around 32 Celcius.

2) Has your weather been seasonally appropriate lately, or has it been unusual?

It’s been much hotter than before. I mean, it’s August, so we’re in top summer weather season, so if it gets hot it’s now — but it is much hotter than previous years.

3) Have you noticed any trends in the weather near you over the past few years?

I recalled that when I was young, it was a really important event if temperatures would hit 30 Celcius somewhere. It just never really happened. And now, we’re in the second heatwave this year, and everyone is like: “At least the temperatures are 32, instead of the 38 we had earlier this year!” It’s kinda frightening to see how fast we got used to temperatures that are basically abnormally high.

4) Are you worried about climate change?

Yes. I worry about it a lot, but ultimately that doesn’t really change anything. It seems like we lack the collective will to do something about it.

5) Are you doing anything to combat climate change?

We drive a hybrid car, and with our jobs now being fully remote, we work from home and hardly drive anyway. We have solar panels on our roof. We heat (and cool) our house with a heat pump instead of gas. Our electricity comes from wind turbines, and the gas that we used is “compensated” (whatever that may mean, but it’s better than nothing). We try to save energy. We use a bank that does not invest in polluting industries.

But all of that doesn’t really change anything — it’s a myth that we are individually responsible for climate change. The concept of “carbon footprint” was thought up by BP as a way to deflect attention from the way they are pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.