About me

Hallo! I am Anja. Thank you for visiting! Holiday Golightly is, of course, just a screen name borrowed from one of the greatest writers in history. This is my little retreat, my luxury, and my place to wallow in Wanderlust, Fernweh and Curiosity. I work full-time and just use my annual leave to travel, so I am pretty good at planning and utilising the time I have to roam the globe.

About me

I am a German ex-transplant to Britain – and the United States, for a brief period. After over ten years in Britain I moved back to Germany, but remembered to bring a pretty good keepsake in the form of my husband. Although we speak English a lot at home, my English was going down the drain, and I was looking for ways to keep it alive.

I got asked a lot about good places to visit, and I was writing long-ish travel lists and reports in my little diary.  So, this blog was born out of a desire to share good trips, to stay literate in the English language and do do something useful with my photographs.

It also serves as a home of travel tales, travel tips, and photographs. I love abandoned buildings, old aircraft dumping sites, shipwrecks and stuff like that, so they may find their way in here.

Suffering from homesickness as a child, I was not a born traveller – and growing up in East Germany, my choices were somewhat limited. But growing up in Germany also meant the great privilege of free school and university education, and later on, a scholarship. So, I have been working in the job I studied for for the past… err, 25 years, and I am never going to waste this for anything. I have always worked in my trained profession full-time and like most of us, I have to earn a salary to go travelling.

I did my first “big” trip only between university and my first job – fourteen days of backpacking in Thailand with funds from my part-time nursing job. I felt like I was conquering the world. And I still love that feeling of setting off, seeing new places, not necessarily keeping the comforts of home, but seeking out new places and experiences. My travel style has changed over the past years, as I have acquired a home, as husband and a bunch of cats. I go away on much shorter trips these days. I sometimes travel with my husband, but most of my trips are actually solo! I tend to stay off the beaten track and look for little-visited places with history and culture that deserve more recognition, eat and buy local and not have a huge carbon footprint.

Last not least, I have started to go on some longer trips last year. First, I studied at the University of Nagasaki for three months, spending six weeks in Japan, and then I went off on a six-week NGO assignment in Bangladesh. I hope to do some more study and some pro bono NGO work in the next years, if my job will allow for it but I am unsure if I will blog about it here!

But what’s with the Holiday Golightly title?

Well… it’s a “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” reference, obviously! This is one of my favourite films since I was 10. A cute classic. You could even buy the book in the German Democratic Republic. Its witty bittersweetness was cunningly disguised as a weirdo avant-garde Gothic-styled “Spectrum Library Short Prose” Edition of 1974. The edition was an odd mix of mainly Soviet authors and some less regime-conformist works – such as the first ever print of anything by Sigmund Freud in Eastern Germany (“Mourning and Melancholia”).

Post-1989, I was finally able to read more Truman Capote works, although, compared to the heavily subsidised books in Eastern Germany, books seemed terribly expensive, and I grew to love his works. Like others collect “Le Petit Prince” in different languages and different editions,  I have a “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” shelf.  I only have this obsession with Evelyn Waugh, Patrick Hamilton and T.S. Eliot, but they all have heroines less likely to go with leisure travel. Is it wise to name this blog after a thinly disguised call girl? Or, as Capote would say, an “American Geisha”? Probably not, but I don’t care. I think it’s genius to have a first name associated with leisure and travel, and a second name associated with an intestinal cleaner. Long may it last.

My style of travel

Since I “came of age” and deemed responsible enough to travel, I have always either studied or worked full time. At present, I get 30 leave days per year – which I think is pretty generous but of course it does not leave much room for long or numerous trips.

Normally, I try to go on 1-2 bigger trips per year, and about 2-3 shorter ones. I book pretty much everything, from flights to hotels to rental cars independently. I usually travel with a backpack or a small carry-on. I fly and although I’m aware of environmental implications, I am not going to stop flying a few times a year. Within Europe, I try to travel by train as much as I can, and when away, I almost always use public transport. So I try to keep the emissions within reason, but green thinking won’t stop me from from travel. I recycle, compost, hardly buy new stuff and and haven’t eaten meat for over 30 years.

Over time, my work has shifted a bit towards travelling, which was a sensible choice, because I travel so much, my geography is pretty good, and I speak a few languages, so many of my choices are now guided by how safe a destination is for travellers, and I have started doing pro bono work in the medical field, but you won’t find these posts on top of this travel blog, which is meant for fun responsible “budget classy” travel.

Despite never having the luxury of unlimited free time, I managed to visit about 60-something countries, and slowly write my own travel story.

I pay my way

I’m writing this for fun in my spare time, and I will keep this free with no adverts. This is just the way I like to run my site. I find adverts popping up annoying, and I am using an adblocker for my own reading, so I’d be a hypocrite if I had ads on my site.

There may be a tiny bit of advertising within the text. If I tell you “Hey, this restaurant is great” it’s advertising, right? Most of it will be unpaid and a genuine recommendation. If I do receive any benefits out if it, I will clearly mark such content as paid advertisement. I am adhering to German and European Union advertising standards.  

Some posts contain affiliate links which mean that I may receive a small commission if you book through one of these links. At present, I only use the affiliate of Booking.com, since I am an avid user of that site myself. I will use any of this income to maintain this blog, or maybe to increase my travel budget. However, I work a full-time job for my income. The blog is a hobby, and this is my place for genuine travel content and honest recommendations. So I am not fussed about numbers and clicks that much, I can watch Artificial Intelligence developments with a relaxed attitude, and just write about what I love.

You are unlikely to find random affiliate links for things and experiences I have not used myself, and neither will you ever find adverts. I mean, I hate ads and use an adblocker, it would be a but hypocritical of me to spam my readers with adverts on my blog.

All trips are booked by and paid for by myself, so will always be completely honest about a place because I can afford to. If I remember the prices for things, I will tell you, too, and all prices are accurate at the time of writing. Please remember, most of our planet had applied the Capitalist system, so prices are likely to go up over time.  If I stay anywhere without paying because I may have tagged along with my partner or went on a business trip and post pictures, I will say so.

Contact

Feel free to comment, send me a message on Instagram, or drop me a line at anja (at) holiday-golightly (dot) com. I work a full time job, so I may not respond instantly, but I will respond to reasonable questions and enquiries.