Contrary to what I regularly do on Saturday mornings (about that later), I decided to listen to The Internationalist’s audio ‘travelcast’ (I don’t have a better name for this). Actually, the direct link is right here (Player is Windows Media Player, but the page itself includes a downloadable mp3 file).
It’s a long piece (running time is about 28 minutes), and I was surprised about the enthusiasm put in this recording. While I’m not particularly into podcasts, they obviously work if done by people who are enthusiastic and interested in specific topics, which in this case is obviously exploration of cultural differences. You can after all still do that in Europe, where borders are a just a drive away. That said, dishing out 80 Euros for a trip in a gondol in Venice sounds rather expensive to me too.
Sticking with the number ‘Eighty’: I admit, I scour YouTube for typical 80s clips of specific bands for no particular reason. It’s not that I do this ‘mindlessly’, which I’m apparently not: it’s that for some kind of reason, the site reminds me of the early days of the WWW, where every link brought you to a new destination (as opposed to the latest online ‘commercial endeavour’). But my god, who pays YouTube’s bandwidth bill.
Thanks for the link and the endorsement. My husband is no radio newbie and he always sounds enthusiastic even if he’s being sarcastic or is dissing something (he isn’t sarcastic much in this recording, however). The enthusiasm may be partially a Hungarian thing too. He sounds pretty much the same in real life. Someone (I think it was someone on the CBC) once referred to the essence of Hungarian-ness as cheerful neuroticism. I would probably amend that to something like cheer with an edge to it and/or with a little nonchalance thrown in for good measure. Anyway, it’s certainly true of my husband. We were also very happy to be going to Croatia, so I think that showed. We’d heard such good things and we’ve been somewhat housebound since the kids arrived. His name isn’t Rusty Shackleford, by the way, in case you were wondering. That’s just a joke.