745a Orkney Living; Walkable Cities; Nomads of Europe

19:13Rick Steves:It's considered a city-planning classic and has been reissued in a revised edition. So, Jeff, let's talk about a couple of cities in Europe. When you, as a city planner, go to Paris, what strikes you as innovative and something you'd like to take home? Well, Mary Hidalgo has been the mayor of Paris for some time. She's a strong socialist. She has done a number of things that you would think would have ended her reign, but she was reelected on the mandate of many more people supporting what she's doing than against it, despite some of the very visible protests. But she really has said, we are going to build a car-free center city.

19:51They're essentially removing cars almost entirely from the central part of that city is the plan over time. She's got 870 miles of new bike lanes she's put in, tens of thousands of parking spaces that she's gotten rid of. She's also backing a 200 million euro plan to turn the Champs -Élysées, you've probably seen the drawings, into this multimodal linear garden. It will still have cars in it, but just many fewer cars moving more slowly, bike lanes, walking lanes, thousands of new trees. So she basically, even before the pandemic, but she responded to the pandemic by saying, wow, you know, we can hear the birds now.

20:28We can breathe fresh air now. Shouldn't the city be like this all the time? And she's been reelected on that mandate.

20:34Rick Steves:And something travelers really are struck by and delighted by is what's called the Paris Plage, the Paris Beach, and there's that two-lane highway along the Seine River that is just, you'd think it'd be critical to move the traffic around because you've got busy, busy lanes going fast without any stop signs and so on along the river. And suddenly, that is no longer accessible to cars, and in the summer, they fill it with sand and they move in palm trees, and you've got a beach. Great success. A big success. And for me, it's brought in a lot of vitality. The city no longer turns its back on the river, but they pull up a lounge chair and enjoy the river.

21:15Rick Steves:And it's great for biking. It's great for entertainment. It's great for restaurants. And it's not great for people who want to drive everywhere. But again, I would say it could be great for those people. They just don't need to drive. That's true. That's true. Let's talk about Barcelona, because Barcelona is a very interesting city in its design. You know, they've got the Echampla district is, to me, wonderful. They've got this, well, you mentioned in your book the importance of having shorter blocks and more compact. The blocks in Barcelona are very small. And there are hundreds and hundreds of them.

21:50The Cerda plan that's famous for those chamfered blocks that you're probably familiar with, where every block has this little chamfered corner. So every intersection is a little diamond-shaped square. I love that. It's a fantastic district.

22:02Rick Steves:I didn't know the name of it, but that is what I think of when I think of Barcelona. Yeah, Serda was the urban designer. And it's one of the densest places in the world. In fact, among the dense European cities, it may be the densest. But they did something remarkable that, of course, their plan helped them to do. But most cities have grid plans that will allow this, was they introduced something called the superblock scheme. And if you can picture a tic-tac-toe board, a nine square where the hashtag is the interior streets, on a whole bunch of their nine squares, they shut all of those blocks to through traffic.

22:37So they might have allowed them to make an L. They might have put in bollards temporarily. People who live there have ways to get in and out. But they ceased to be part of the regional transportation system for that part of the city. And it was a miracle. People who fought it ended up loving it, and they've added more and more superblocks to Barcelona since they started.

23:01Rick Steves:And these are sort of self-contained neighborhoods almost where you can walk to everything you need. It's quite remarkable. Yeah, and I think the difference is in the U.S., people love to snip their blocks to through traffic, but then the streets on the perimeter get wider and wider. Yeah. In a response, in Barcelona, there was no corresponding enlargement of any other streets. It just created a circumstance in which more people were happy walking and biking, and therefore there were fewer people driving and a happier outcome. Yeah. You know, when we talk about happier outcomes, all over Europe, I'm finding cities are embracing this idea of naked streets.

23:37Rick Steves:It seems like insane to have no signs at an intersection, but apparently it really works. Well, the famous engineer who came up with that concept used to stand in front of the cameras and then walk backwards into his naked intersections as they were filming. And we would observe as the cars would swerve around him very slowly. But this idea of Malcolm Gladwell calls it risk homeostasis. And he talks about how every human is comfortable living with a certain amount of risk, and they will actually adjust their behavior to enjoy that level of risk. And so when you create an intersection that is so clear and easy to understand, people just speed right through it.

24:21And the European response is to make things a little more confusing so that each intersection is approached with care. Some have suggested the American equivalent would be that when you get into the middle of a city in your car, your seatbelt pops off and a spike appears on the steering wheel. Yeah. Well, then you would stop.

24:42Rick Steves:This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're getting radical with city design here with Jeff Speck. And it's not radical in Europe, but it sure seems radical where I'm sitting here in the United States. I tell my clients that. I mean, I'm working in Scranton. I'm working in Maui, Orlando, Hyannis, Massachusetts. And they hopefully don't believe that I'm radical. What we're doing is we're sharing best practices that have succeeded not only in Europe, but in a bunch of American cities, as you've observed in the Pacific Northwest, where a lot of great gains have been made towards making cities more welcome.

25:18Rick Steves:And it's exciting to know there are people like you working on this very diligently. Jeff's the city planner, and he's the author of Walkable City. Jeff, tell me a little bit about this notion I read in your book, Walkable City, where you don't even have curbs. What you have is bricks that go from building to building all the way across the street, so you don't know what's really pedestrian and what's for cars. Well, that's called shared space. and the ultimate example of it, which you can find a video on YouTube called Pointon Regenerated, P-O-Y-N-T-O-N, Pointon is a city in England, where they did that.

25:56They had a downtown that was just dying from too much traffic. There was a sense of just congestion and danger. And they basically put in kind of a, what I would call a peanut about, like a double round about, where the whole thing was pavered and cobbled and removed all the signals. But this idea of creating streets that are plazas, that are paved from edge to edge like plazas, in which everyone's expected to mix at extremely low speed, is appropriate in certain dense downtown centers and town centers. I have only worked on one project that was able to pull that off because it does not sit comfortably within the manuals of the American traffic engineering profession.

26:38But more and more American cities are interested in creating these spaces.

26:43Rick Steves:Now, part of the challenge, I would imagine, is giving people who really are committed to driving from city to city a convenient way and an economic way to get out of their car and then become a walking visitor. And in Europe, it's pretty routine now where you have the city ringed by government subsidized inexpensive parking lots that come with a shuttle bus that takes you into the center, or a parking lot by a suburban subway station, and then you just leave your car, hop on the train, go downtown, and you get around with public transit, or with one of these cheap rental out-of-the-bike-rack kind of public bicycles, or just walking around.

27:26Rick Steves:What's your take on these park-and-ride kind of approaches? Well, I think that you have to make it worth it for people. So it works in Europe and in a few limited American places, because the walk, once you get out of your car, is actually a better experience than driving. I have in my book what I call the general theory of walkability, in which I talk about the fact that if people are going to make the choice to walk in America, the walk has to be better than the drive. And to do that, it has to satisfy four things simultaneously. It has to be useful. It has to be safe. It has to be comfortable.

28:02and it has to be interesting. And if you can accomplish those four things, in most American cities, it's just a small portion of the city where that is possible because you have the mixed use to begin with, right? A walk being useful means that you're in a mixed use area with a proper balance of most of the aspects of daily life. And not many of our neighborhoods pull that off. But in our older neighborhoods, particularly our older commercial neighborhoods, our central business districts and our old downtowns, main streets, that's where that usefulness is possible. And if it exists, then you just supplement that by making the streets safe, which is actually the easiest thing to do because the cities own the streets.

28:40So the cities can very quickly re-stripe their streets to make them safer and more multimodal, welcoming bikes and transit. And then the longer slog is the comfortable and interesting part of the discussion because that's basically the outcome of what buildings, what private buildings mostly are lining the streets and are they shaping the space in a proper way. As an urban designer, I spend a lot of time thinking about the shape of the space. We like to make our streets as outdoor living rooms. And what does that mean? It means they have good edges. It means they really hold you comfortably. So we spend a lot of time on that.

29:14Rick Steves:Jeff Speck is with us on Travel with Rick Steves as we look at examples for turning cities into walkable, people-friendly spaces. Jeff's 2012 book, Walkable City, is the best-selling city planning book of the past decade and is out in an updated edition. He's also written Walkable City Rules, 101 Steps to Making Better Places. Jeff's TED Talks and YouTube videos on the topic have been viewed by millions. His website is specdempsy.com. Jeff, it's been so much fun talking to you. We're just about out of time, but I'd love to let you be the tour guide right now. And with your ability to see things through the eyes and the sensibilities of a city planner, what can we travelers do to enjoy our visits to whatever city we're going to, let's say in Europe, a little bit more.

30:02Rick Steves:What do you look for and how can that help us? Well, I'll give you one tip, which I use myself, which I think anyone is capable of doing, which is whenever I'm about to book a hotel in a foreign city, particularly a European city, I'll go on the Google Maps and I'll find the medieval neighborhood. That's the neighborhood where the streets are cranky, where they're narrow, where the blocks are tiny. You know, sometimes the best hotels, you know, the Hotel de Vie or whatever, are located in the Enlightenment part of town or the Beaux-Arts part of town. And those can all be great to see for spectacle and for energy or for monuments.

30:35But it's always the medieval part of the city that's the most walkable, most delightful, most mysterious, that has the tiny shops that can only hold a non-chain store, the special mom-and-pop places. I always find those neighborhoods for my hotel.

30:51Rick Steves:I can think of several towns right now where that's exactly the case. Barcelona's Gothic Quarter is a perfect example. Rome's Medieval Quarter. And what's fun is even American cities have our, you know, the oldest ones. We have a Gothic Quarter, or so it would seem, in Boston, in New York City. You know, Wall Street is that place. Oh, yeah. You know, our older cities have those as well here. Jeff Speck, thanks so much for joining us, and happy travels, and let's all hope for a more walkable urban world. Thanks, Rick. It's been great to join you here. They're living just enough. Just enough of a city

31:34Rick Steves:You'll find web links to our guests in the notes for each week's show at ricksteves.com slash radio. If city life gets to be a little too much for you, maybe you'd rather just get out of town. Well, up next, we'll look at how the wanderers among us, outsiders in nomadic communities, have often been a sort of counterbalance to the great empires of human history. Anthony Satin explains, next on Travel with Rick Steves. I've long been fascinated by nomads. I've encountered them in my travels, the Bedouins in Morocco and Palestine, Kurds in Turkey, Sami people in Scandinavia, Roma, and I've wondered about how the cards are stacked against any group of people who don't want to settle down, who don't want to own land and build fences and send their children to the same school as everybody else so they can fit into the mold as dedicated by the dominant settled culture.

32:27Rick Steves:The urge to move exists within all of us, yet half of the world's population lives in cities. The nomadic societies that played a key role in shaping our history had no written history, and today most of them are gone. Anthony Satin digs deep into this overlooked side of history and how the mobile and settled have come together and diverged through the centuries. It's all in his book, Nomads, the Wanderers Who Shaped Our World. Anthony joins us today to talk about the nomadic societies in and around Europe. Anthony, thanks so much for being with us. Rick, thanks for having me on the show. So is it true that nomadic people never wrote down their own history?

33:07Yeah, almost never. It's an oral tradition. And that's part of the sort of the makeup of their internal relations. Everybody gathers together and they tell stories.

33:17Rick Steves:When you travel in and around Europe, I'm talking Europe, I'm talking North Africa, the Middle East and so on, you're very likely to encounter these cultures. Maybe not under the stars at a tent at an oasis, but in a market or semi-nomadic settled and so on. What's the state of the Bedouin people in North Africa and the Middle East? The big news is they're still there and there's still quite a lot of them. They're always under threat. Government's always wanting to make them settle and offering these two carrots of education for the kids and health care for the elderly. But the one constant is that they keep on doing what they've always done, and that is moving around.

33:58Less of them than there were, but they're still doing it.

34:01Rick Steves:You know, I suppose that's easier for them to do that where they move around because it's deserts and people don't really want that land anyway, so they're free to roam it. Yeah, the majority of our planet is not good for agriculture. So the majority of the planet is good for herding. So yeah, there's plenty of space for them to keep on doing it if governments will let them take on that land. And you mentioned up in the frozen north and down in the hot south, but unfortunately for a lot of nomads, there's gold in them, their hills. Yeah, that can change all of a sudden. That's the story of the U.S.

34:36as well. The Western tribes in the U.S. in the 19th century lost out because of the gold rush.

34:42Rick Steves:You know, one of the most fascinating courses I ever had when I was at the University of Washington was based on a book called Reflections on the Basic Causes of Human Misery. It was a fascinating book. And the takeaway was the most unmiserable societies were people who lived on land that nobody wanted. And also who lived in a bonded community like that with a narrative. And in a way, this thing about oral history is important because so many of us and in so many different countries I go to have lost that sense of a shared narrative of who we are. Now, in Turkey, there are a lot of Kurds. And I understand the word Kurd actually comes from the root for the word for nomad.

35:19Rick Steves:There's like tens of millions of these Kurds in eastern Turkey. It's one of the largest, you could call it, nations without states. They don't have their own boundary. They're not able to have their own government. But they're still thriving. in eastern Turkey, it seems like, as a community. What is your take on the Kurds? Well, this is a really hot potato politically, and not just in Turkey, but in Iraq as well. The Kurds fought... Kurdistan. You don't want to say that word Kurdistan in certain circles. No, exactly, exactly. But you have to wonder what happened after the First World War when the British and the French were carving up the Middle East.

35:58There were the states for the Arabs. There was talk about Armenia for the Armenians. But the Kurds?

36:04Rick Steves:No, it's just draw the line and silence, yeah. Yeah, and it is because there are nomadic peoples and the tent dwellers rather than the town or city dwellers, and that's the problem. Okay, so we've got lots of Kurds, and then Sami, there's like I think 100 ,000 people up in the Arctic of Scandinavia who make their living basically herding reindeer. That's right, that's right. But I think they are more integrated and sort of more happily in connection with certainly in Sweden with the government there. Probably because the government is more progressive and sensitive to their needs. Certainly, and also because there's a recognition of there's a value to herding reindeer.

36:43And I mean, I write in my book about the Bakhtiari in Iran. I mean, nomads in Iran produce a significant amount of meat, you know, because they've got all these sheep, millions of them, and they sell them into market. So it's, you know, this is an important part of the Iranian economy.

36:59Rick Steves:It's almost part of the environment, the ecosystem, is to have people taking care of the sheep so they thrive. Yeah, exactly. No, but the problem is this long, long historical view, and the reason why I wrote this book is because in our histories, our histories are simply not fit for purpose because they don't reflect the reality of the relationship between the nomadic and settled people, which is one of mutual dependence. We're looking at the underappreciated side of history with author Anthony Satin right now on Travel with Rick Steves. He's the author of Nomads, The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World, as well as earlier historical titles on Egypt and North Africa.

37:36Rick Steves:From his own travels, Anthony's collected stories from 12 ,000 years of nomadic societies, most recently with Bakhtiari nomads in Iran. Anthony's own wanderings have led him to Umbria in Italy, where he's joining us from his home studio. I want to get more into the specifics about nomadic culture, but there's two groups I want to finish in our survey before we dive into that, and that is Irish travelers or tinkers and the Roma or the gypsy community. First of all, when we go to Ireland, Anthony, you just can't help but run into comments or references to the travelers. Who are these people? And is that actually a community like we're talking about the Samis and the Kurds and the Bedouins?

38:19Yes, it is still a community. I mean, a shrinking community, but it's definitely still a community. And we have them in England as well. There are travelers and they move around and they traditionally, they had at least for the last 50 years in my lifetime, they were people who would deal in all sorts of things that other people didn't want to deal with, scrap metal or whatever it was. They were functioning on the fringe of communities, literally, and on the fringe of economy.

38:46Rick Steves:Historically, do we have something like that in the United States? You have your great Native American tribes in the United States. Well, apart from that, because I mean, I'm thinking you're talking about not an ethnic group so much as just a society that would rather have a nomadic lifestyle and sell scrap metal or something. Oh, yeah. But you still do have in the United States a vast number of people who choose to live in what was called wheel estate rather than real estate. And the movie Nomadland absolutely pins that story brilliantly. There you go. Wheel estate. I've never heard that. That's great.

39:21Rick Steves:It's a good one. One more one more reason to read your book, Nomads, the Wanderers who Shaped Our World. The final European group of nomadic people I'd like to mention is the Roma or the gypsies. What's the story with the Roma people? The Roma people are a people that I mean, unlike sort of Irish thinkers or whatever, who are more of a not such an ethnic group as an occupation. The Roma are an ethnic group and their origins are somewhat obscure, but it probably came from India originally, but a long, long time ago. And they can trace their history back at least to the Roman Empire, and that's partly their name, and from Romania.

39:58But they are not well received in most places where they're found.

40:04Rick Steves:All European societies were nomadic at first, and they eventually settled down and bought land and made fences and changed from herders to farmers. Is what the difference with the Roma community is? They just never decided to morph into that, which fits better into the modern mold. So they've been a disadvantaged group because they've held on to those pre-settled ways. Yeah, absolutely. And maybe another way of looking at them is with an element of fascination, as in they are part of our story, as all New York ads are. This is the way we all did at once. Oh, it's amazing because I've visited fascinating Roma communities in Romania.

40:41Rick Steves:A big question for me lately is I'm just perplexed with the proper term. Of course, we've all grown up saying gypsies, and now I understand Roma is the preferred term. Do the Roma people, are they unified in this desire to change the name? Of course, gypsies is a misnomer, you know, because it says they're from Egypt when they weren't from Egypt. Yeah, exactly. But do all Roma consider gypsy to be derogatory? I think there is a sense of, yeah, that it has the wrong connotation for them. I mean, you don't often hear people sort of waxing lyrical about the gypsy. No, but that's because people have given that up to the notion they're all thieves and so on.

41:20Rick Steves:And, you know, when you go to Spain, you've got a pride in the gypsy community. There's a group called the Gypsy Kings. You go to Granada, which has got 50 ,000 gypsies, I think, and they call themselves gypsies. Yeah, the whole flamenco culture comes out of that gypsy. Yeah, I mean, you wouldn't say a Roma cave in Granada. You'd say a gypsy cave. No, exactly. That's true. I don't know. It's a complicated thing. Anthony Satin is a fellow with the Royal Geographic Society, and he's hosted TV and radio documentaries on travel for the BBC. We're talking with him right now on Travel with Rick Steves about his most recent book, Nomads.

41:57Rick Steves:His website is anthonysatin.com, spelled S-A-T-T-I-N. So, Anthony, basically, why do nomads wander? No. The real question is, why do we not all wander? Wandering is our natural state. You know, we make a journey at the beginning of our life from the womb to the light, and religion tells us we make a journey at the end of our life, all religions tell us, we make a journey at the end of our life to the other world. And in between, some of us choose not to move, and it's just such a strange thing. Yes, well, that's very fundamental. So that really divides us. And as you mentioned in your book, a long, long, long, long time ago, there were 40 million nomadic people.

42:43Rick Steves:And that was 100 % of humanity, apparently. And today there's 40 million nomadic people, but it's less than 1 % of humanity. So there's as many wanderers today as there was 12 ,000 years ago. Is that right? Yeah. And think about the weirdness of living a subtle life where we're constantly being told we have to walk 10 ,000 steps. I mean, to a nomad, this is just ridiculous. Imagine a nomad with a little wristwatch that showed how many steps he's been to do. You think you're a nutcase. Hey, I'm curious about just the way nomadic societies work. And I would imagine this is pretty much consistent across the board.

43:19Rick Steves:Gender roles. Briefly, what are the traditional gender roles with the nomadic community? Well, this is one of the surprises that I found looking back into history and these three famous nomads that we can name check who get this bad reputation. They're Tella the Hun, Genghis Khan and Timur or Tamburlain. And for them, women are absolutely central to all the decision making, all the sort of gathering of the grandees and the elders. There are women. And, you know, Genghis Khan's wife is the one who, you know, sits beside him the whole way through the building up and administration of his emperor.

43:53And that plays through to today in a lot, if not all, nomadic societies. Women have a central role.

44:01Rick Steves:You know, here is a very interesting moment or image that might represent what you're saying. I was in eastern Turkey hanging out with a Kurdish nomadic family in their black hair tent, right? They have these black goat hair tents, like go all the way back to biblical times. The mother was there with the children, and the little boy was playing his eagle bone flute. And this was amazing just to see the mom making the tea and the boy playing his eagle bone flute. And then over the bluff, way in the distance, I couldn't see him, the dad would play his eagle bone flute. So the boy knew the dad was okay, the dad knew the boy was okay, and the dad was out of sight with the herds, and the mom was in the tent with the kids, and the eagle bone flute was connecting them and connecting through times for millennia, literally thousands of years.

44:54Rick Steves:But that kind of represented the fundamental situation, and it seems that has not changed very much through the centuries. No, and how beautiful is that as an image? I've got goosebumps for that. I do too. I love that. I'm so thankful for that moment and to know that what I was listening to was so representative of a beautiful, beautiful way of life that is struggling in the confines of our modern kind of settled world. Well, it's struggling, but it's still there. And this is the important thing. And it hasn't gone. There's this image that I love of history as a path picked through ruins. And the suggestion that, you know, history is about people who build things, who build the pyramids, the Colosseum or whatever.

45:41But I think before long, we're going to be reading histories about the people not who built monuments or destroyed them, but about the people who maintained the natural world around them. Yes.

45:52Rick Steves:There's an ever greater value in people that are connected with the natural world as it becomes an existential challenge to preserve it. You know, when I was with that Kurdish community, we were talking about the challenges in their life. And they talked about how the Turkish government had offered them land, offered them schools, trying to get them almost to bribe them to settle down and speak the same language and join the dominant culture. and they really found it was really offensive to their own what they treasured and honoured and they refused it. And that's kind of the disadvantage that nomadic communities have around the world, isn't it?

46:27Rick Steves:That in order to be embraced by the dominant culture, they've really got to abandon theirs. It is a problem and language is absolutely key to that because in a way the language, and I know this, for instance, with some of the Saharan tribes in Egypt, for instance, they're forced to speak and learn Egyptian Arabic, which deprives them of their dialect. Oh, yes. And that's something that those of us who don't have to struggle to preserve our language aren't very sensitive to. But if a society is not allowed to have its own language, that is over the line. I mean, that cannot be allowed. They've got to defend the right to speak their language.

47:07Rick Steves:Exactly. And but, you know, I wonder, I mean, in the US, the Native American languages, are they still current? Do people still talk them? I don't know. I don't know, but I do know that when there's a struggle with an ethnic group in Europe that is a nation without a state, a group of people that have their nation, but they don't have a political boundary, the bone of contention is a lot of time, can we have education for our people? And I know for indigenous people in Central America, you know, the government of Guatemala will give them an education, but it's Spanish, and they say, no, we want it in our language, and they don't get it, so they become an underclass.

47:43That's problematic, very problematic.

47:46Rick Steves:So this is Travel with Rick Steves. We've been talking with Anthony Satin, and his book is Nomads, The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World. I've been fascinated by nomads ever since I've been traveling because as you travel, if you reach out, you find the resilience of the nomadic communities and the deep history and how there is this little do-si-do between the people who are unsettled, nomads, and people who are settled, what we would call civilized, which is a horribly ethnocentric way to put it. Today, Anthony, we're out of time, but I would just like to kind of wrap it up with what is the future for nomadic peoples?

48:24Rick Steves:Is there a sort of a best scenario? And is it possible to have culturally sensitive tourism? Can that be a good thing? I don't think things are as bleak as they might be for a lot of nomadic peoples. I think they're even more than we talked about politics and how governments like to settle and probably even more dangerous for them is global warming, climate change. For instance, in Mongolia, which has a long, long tradition of nomadic people, because most of the country is unfit for farming. Because of the summers in El is so hot and the winters are so cold. A lot of Mongolia's nomads are now living, given up and there's now a tent city around the capital.

49:06and they're all looking for jobs. So that's their greatest.

49:10Rick Steves:I think you see the same dynamic in Palestine with the Bedouins. Yes, you do. Yes, you do. But at the same time, they are still doing what they do and they are still who they are. And I'm optimistic. I'm optimistic. And then just if we're curious, as people who want to have a broader perspective and learn from our travels, is there a culturally sensitive way to, and can that bring economy in a healthy way to these communities to weave that into our travels as tourists? Yes, I think it obviously has to be small scale, low key. Can't have thousands of people turning up and hanging out with one particular family in their tent.

49:52Rick Steves:Then it becomes more of a spectacle instead of a... Exactly. But, you know, but I mean, some of the families that I stayed with in Iran, for instance, I mean, that was entirely transactional. I was a paying guest. It was like staying in someone's home, except their home was a tent. Again, this is Travel with Rick Steves. We've been talking with Anthony Satin. His book is Nomads, The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World. Anthony, thank you so much for your interest in nomadic communities and for sharing it so eloquently in your book. Thank you for this opportunity of talking about this really important topic.

50:28Travel with Rick Steves is produced by Tim Tatton, Kaz Moura-Hall, and Donna Bardsley at Rick Steves Europe in Edmonds, Washington. Andrew Wakeling and Sherry Court upload the shows to our website. Sheila Gerzoff handles affiliate promotions, and our theme music is by Jerry Frank. You can find links to our guests, listen to a podcast version of the show, and search the archives at ricksteves.com slash radio. We'll look for you again next week with more Travel with Rick Steves.

51:00Rick Steves:Hey, I'm Rick Steves. In my work, I've always measured profit not in dollars earned, but by trips impacted. And after over 40 years of teaching travel, it's clear to me that if you equip yourself with good information and expect yourself to travel smart, you will. For us, content is king. That's why we offer a world of free content at ricksteves.com. All the TV shows we've ever produced, 50 hours of practical lectures, talks ranging from packing smart and tech on the road to cruising and language lessons. A thriving family of travelers comparing notes in our forum and more. And again, it's all entirely free.

51:40Rick Steves:It's at ricksteves.com.