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 very 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 British 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 the Eastern Block, my choices were somewhat limited. Growing up in Germany also meant the great privilege of free school and university education, and later on, a scholarship. So I am never going to waste this for anything and 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 – I felt like I was conquering the world! And I still like that feeling of setting off, seeing new places, not necessarily keeping the comforts of home, but seeking out new places and experiences takes priority over luxury and holiday vibes. 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.

But what’s with the Holiday Golightly title?

Well… 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

I have always either studied or worked full time. At present , I get 30 leave days per year – which I think is pretty generous! 

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 annoying adverts. This is just the way I like to run my site.

There may be a bit of advertising – if I tell you “Hey, this restaurant is great” it’s advertising, right? But if I receive any benefits out if it, I will clearly mark such content as paid advertisement, and, trust me, it’s not going to happen too often.  Some posts contain affiliate links but I work a full-time job for income. It probably shows, and this isn’t the place for slick photos and sponsored content.

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.