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([personal profile] catness Aug. 22nd, 2025 09:22 am)
From [community profile] thefridayfive.

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?

If capsule hotels count, then yes (in particularly, Japan: Tokyo and Kyoto). LOVED IT!!! Never stayed in a proper hostel (room with roommates), I consider it (for price) but have serious doubts, because I'm a diehard introvert, and lack of privacy is terrifying.

2. What is your favo(u)rite airport that you've been to? Why?

I remember being impressed by Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, because it was so big and not too crowded, and had a lot of variety in shops and food places.

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

Tokyo teamLab Planets, hosting an interactive art exhibition which feels like being inside a video game - you don't just watch stuff but wade through water, climb narrow corridors, find your way through a mirror maze, meditate in a garden, light flowers in the rain (rain was an unexpected bonus ;) and such.

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

No, I can't socialize with strangers, sadly. Maybe if you count Pokemon Go friends? I friended a couple of people during a Pokemon Go fest in Germany, and we still exchange in-game gifts occasionally.

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

Hahahaha no way.
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nundinae: michiru, mirror (Default)
([personal profile] nundinae Aug. 21st, 2025 08:54 pm)
 I suppose I’m in my middle-aged-and-older-women-and-their-memoirs-and-letters phase. Is this The Legacy of Q, strictly speaking, a memoir? I think it is, Helene Hanff probably would have been against that. It is only a pity that it is so short, though I couldn’t help thinking that Hanff somehow did not really believe her life would deserve a memoir – but maybe I am reading her all wrong and it’s all just false modesty.

I loved all the tiny little details about local histories: her work in the theatre, her work for television before the shows became properly scripted shortly after 1960 or so (I really need to read more about the history of television), her children’s books (although I would have hated them as a child). I loved the fad for “Nothing Books” in New York, and Hanff’s systematic planning of what she needs to read was extremely charming, somehow.

Her interactions with her fans were really crazy, though, especially from the point of view of an average European, clutching her pearls about privacy and privacy laws. Of course I do know European privacy laws are new even in Europe, and I do know as well that the rules about press reporting are less concerned with privacy in most anglophone countries, and I have read that book about press reporting in Japan in the 70s and 80s, with journalists basically camping on the lawns of politicians or suspects in criminal cases, and so on. But it’s still insane! Her fans knew her home address and telephone number. They would call her. They would send her letters. They would send her books to be signed (with no return postage, how rude!). Hanff quotes some of the letters and phone conversations, so one can see with one’s own eyes how wild this whole thing was. And well into the eighties!

It's a pity she didn’t write more about herself and some of her friends, like Genevieve Young, the literary editor and daughter of a Chinese diplomat murdered by Japanese fascists during the second world war. She seems an absolutely fascinating person, reaching leading positions in the industry when it was so hostile to women. But this is also where you can see how dated the book is: when Young got her US passport, Hanff writes in all innocence “The alien with the Chinese passport was finally an ordinary American citizen coming home” and then that Young was “as Chinese as General Motors”. Ouch.  

nundinae: michiru, mirror (Default)
([personal profile] nundinae Aug. 21st, 2025 11:12 am)
 This is so depressing: the number of people reading for pleasure in the US has fallen by 40% in the last 20 years. This kind of news makes me so down every time I see it, and of course it's hardly limited to the US. There are all kinds of reasons for this happening, and personally I think that being overworked is ignored far too often: it is so difficult to find pleasure in anything at all when you are so tired you just want to veg out (which of course will not help you relax, deceptive as it is). And it takes effort to reach the level of ease with reading that allows you to read for pleasure at all: it's really just like any kind of physical activity. But if you do manage, it's just about the most brilliant thing in the world, which is something I would love to be able to say in a persuasive manner to as many people as possible in the probably vain hope that they will read something and have fun with it, but well. Books are fun! Reading is awesome!
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