746a Goodbye Eastern Europe; The Long Field in Wales

19:25More conservative. More conservative. And more Catholic.

19:27Rick Steves:Because Poland is the most church-going part in Europe in a lot of ways, I think. You know, during communism, the Catholic Church was, people went to church even if they didn't believe in that because it was a way to stand up against the government. They did it for freedom. Today, is the Catholic Church used as a pawn in any way between the left and the right politically? Absolutely. Who's using it? definitely the Polish Catholic Church has thrown itself in on one side electorally, which you see a little bit in America, but they've really... On the right. On the right. Okay. This is Travel with Rick Steves, and we're talking with Jacob Mikonowski.

19:58Rick Steves:He's the author of Goodbye Eastern Europe. Jacob's completed doctoral work in European history at UC Berkeley, and now he works as a freelance journalist and historian based out of Portland, Oregon. We'll have more ways to connect with Jacob in the show notes for this week's episode at ricksteves.com slash radio. Jacob, you wrote that the essential defining characteristic of Eastern Europe is diversity, diversity of language, of ethnicity, and above all, of faith. Above all, faith. We just talked about the Catholic Church in Poland. How does faith and organized religion shape the story of this region?

20:31Rick Steves:Because you've got Jews, you've got Muslims, you've got Christians, and you've got lots of history. If you're looking for deeper roots of Eastern Europe, I think for me that's where it comes in. As Western Europe became more homogenous in the Middle Ages, Western Europe became ever more kind of solidly Catholic. Western European countries, starting with Great Britain, and then France and Spain, kicked their Jews out. And they kicked their Muslims out. And those Jews usually went east. And they really found a safe haven in Poland, especially. Poland, Lithuania, and then Hungary, and then Romania, and all those countries became the cradle of Jews in Europe.

21:04And Muslims, they got driven out of Spain, but they drove into the Balkans. So you have the biggest Muslim populations in Europe or in Eastern Europe. There's still Muslim-majority countries there. And you actually have sprinklings of mosques and Muslim populations all the way up to Lithuania and Poland. Actually, there are mosques in very small numbers now, but in Poland, you can go to the eastern Poland, you can go to wooden mosques staying back hundreds of years where it's really cool to go.

21:30Rick Steves:You've got a very, very cool photograph in your book of a little wooden mosque with like a staircase that goes up for the minaret. When we think about, you know, religions in eastern Europe, you mentioned Jews. it's hard to overestimate how important Poland was for Judaism during the diaspora. I mean, it was called the Jewish Paradise for a while, even all the way back to King Kazimierz, right? Of course, when you have the Jewish Paradise it's a relative term. It was still tough in a lot of ways, but that would be a place that Hitler would put his sights on. And I think of the 6 million people Hitler killed half of them died in Poland.

22:08Half of them were in Poland. And Poland used to be part of this bigger country called Poland-Lithuania. It's a big, it's like ramshackle, dual monarchy. But that was the homeland of most of Europe's Jews. And about 80%, 80 plus percent of American Jews will trace back their lineage to somewhere in there, because most Russian Jews are from there too.

22:26Rick Steves:It's amazing. And it was just Jews would go there because that was the biggest welcome or the least unwelcome. And they had the biggest, they were useful there. This is kind of, you can kind of imagine Eastern Europe in a way also, the way the American West used to be. That was much more open, it was slower to develop. You had big forests and empty fields, and you needed people. You needed settlers to come in, and you needed peasants to farm, and you needed other people to sell. And a lot of anti-Semitic societies, they welcomed the Jews just from a pragmatic point of view. Jews had the skills.

22:57Rick Steves:They were the bankers. They were the businessmen. They were the traders. And in Eastern Europe, especially in Poland, Lithuania, especially in the East, they lived in towns. Like my grandfather came from one of these towns that I actually spent a lot of time in, like a real shtetl, which was 40, 60, 80 percent Jewish. And Jews did all the small town activities, cobbler, baker, farmers and carpenters and all the things you would go to a town. The engine, you know, of the economy. Some people are farming and they have to bring their grain and their things into a town and then have all those little small town services.

23:28And the Jews did all the small town stuff.

23:29Rick Steves:Here's an example of how faith permeates this sort of story of Eastern Europe. If you think of former Yugoslavia, you've got Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. And the way I understand it, they're all the same ethnically. They just are distinguished by the religions, Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim. So Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks. Bosniaks. Oh, that's it. Slovenes speak a slightly— Bosniaks have that Muslim. And they essentially speak the same language. It's mutually intelligible. But they'll call it Serbian or Croatian, but it's just a— It's essentially the same thing. And you look at them and all you can define them by is their respective religions.

24:06So the religion is that dividing line. The language is basically the same. If you're outside of it, to a Polish speaker like me, it sounds the same. I was just in a Starbucks listening to some Bosnian women speak, and I'm like, oh, I can kind of get this. But those religious identities, Muslim, Catholic, Orthodox, are huge dividing lines. And that's what split Yugoslavia apart was that it was this cradle of diversity and ended up being coming a fault line that pulled it apart, ripped it apart, really, in the 90s in a really tragic way.

24:36Rick Steves:And this is what stirs the history that we read of and when we think of the chaos and the heartache in the hard history of Eastern Europe. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're joined by journalist Jacob Mikonowski today. and he's combined 20 years of teaching and travel and research, plus his own Polish, Lithuanian, Jewish, and Catholic family history, into his latest book. It's called Goodbye Eastern Europe. You can learn more about Jacob at his website. It's jacob-mikinowski.com. And that's M-I-K-A-N-O-W-S-K-I. You write in your book, during the 20th century, fascism, communism, and nationalism provided people with powerful sources of meaning-making.

25:19Rick Steves:Tell us about that. Part of the goodbyes in Europe is you're saying goodbye, I'm saying goodbye to that world of my grandparents, great-grandparents, the world of that full diversity that vanished over the 20th century, that world where you would go to a village and you can get glimpses of this in Bosnia, you can get glimpses of it in places in Albania where you can go to a town and there's a mosque and there's an Orthodox church and a Catholic church and sometimes a synagogue and they're all together, different faiths that was kind of woven through everything. But that was held in place probably by empire, that there's something very far away.

25:52If you have the rule and the rulers are very far away, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that kind of no one is in charge of their own destiny, but everyone can kind of coexist or is forced to coexist because those divisions are useful.

26:06Rick Steves:But if you have a smaller unit of power, then it can work for purity, ethnic purity. Exactly. And then you start saying, well, we need to be nationalist. we need to have a country that is ruled by the people who are the majority in it. So we should have one language, and language usually goes with religion, and you have that attempt to impose purity on a space. Because what I found in former Yugoslavia, because some societies were ravaged by the war and others were not, if you had a demographic situation in a former Yugoslav ethnic region, and there was a very tiny minority, well, that minority had no chance.

26:43Rick Steves:They would just escape. They would be banished. But if you had a sizable minority, there's where you'd have more fighting. And the part of Yugoslavia that suffered the most was the states that had sizable minorities instead of tiny minorities. Exactly. And the kind of Bosnia-Herzegovina, most of all, that didn't have a majority. That just had a group, like there was one minority was biggest, that had a plurality, but no majority. And so you have everyone shocking for power. That's a prescription for bloodshed. And trying to get the neighbors to come in and help you out, yeah. In your book, you also wrote, history is never singular.

27:16Rick Steves:It always provides multiple narratives with which to explain the present. Politics shifted into a never-ending series of battles about the past. So important to have a dual narrative. It's hard for me to write scripts. It's hard for me to write my guidebooks in Eastern Europe because you're captive of one guide and he's got one ethnic or community narrative. Whenever there's a wall, there's two sides and you've got to talk to both sides. And so much of the politics has become, like we were saying, about since the 90s has become about history. Some places like Poland and actually also Hungary and Romania, it will be about finding a new reason for the country to be what it is.

27:54And so you promote certain parts of the past in a very active way that they're like, this is where we're at our best. This is the story we want to sell. And there can be very different. In Hungary, they will go back a thousand years to the pagan Magyars and they love the invasion of the Magyars and that story of conquest from outside. And in Poland, they really want the story of World War II and the story of the anti-Soviet war and the people who fought both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, that those are the people who kind of suffered the most and suffered in the right way. And you have those narratives built around.

28:26These are countries and societies that used to be very plural, had lots of other people, not just one language, not just one religion. So you lose some of that multifacetedness, that mosaic that really is, I think, the key of what the region is about.

28:41Rick Steves:Journalist Jacob Mikonowski is guiding us through profound changes in the last generation to the countries that lie between Germany and Russia, from Estonia in the north to Albania in the south. Jacob's book is Goodbye Eastern Europe, an intimate history of a divided land. Today's show is from the travel with Rick Steves archives. Jacob Mikonowski, you've clearly done a lot of work with this Goodbye Eastern Europe project of yours, and also you've clearly woven in your own family's heritage, And you've been here in the United States basically for a generation, coming from Poland. And I'm wondering, because as I read through your book, there's so many things that kind of hint at what's going on in America today.

29:21Rick Steves:Do you have any takeaways, any thoughts that the more we understand what's going on in Eastern Europe historically, the more we have a good insight into the challenges that American democracy is facing right now? I think so. I think this might be a Polish perspective, but I often think, and I probably pay attention the most to Poland and Hungary, but they have some of the same challenges, some of the same developments. I see things happen there before they happen here. There's a way in which America is more like Eastern Europe than it is like Western Europe. Western Europe has these very kind of narrow politics that's kind of everyone's often, like in Germany, everyone's closer to the same page, I feel like.

30:04And in Eastern Europe, you'll have these major struggles between parties and one always trying to kind of crush the other one, wipe it out. And that democracy can't have this when there isn't like a clear center. You can have this real attempt to negate your opponent. It's still democracy. It looks like democracy, but you're trying to always tip it over to something else. And you have some of that that anger and that anguish coming into America, I think, like 10 years after I saw in Eastern Europe.

30:32Rick Steves:And it's exacerbated by people digging into their religion and also people groping for wars that were fought a long time ago and to refight them. To refight them and to come up with a very kind of set template of what this country should look like. It should look like this one thing and everything that's outside of it is prohibited or prescribed. Like this is what a real Pole is, this is what a real Hungarian is. You have that kind of real American thing coming in. So interesting. Such a great reason to understand where you're traveling by doing a little research, so you can read, so you can bring some context.

31:07Rick Steves:And so important to travel. And while you're away from home, see if you can learn more about your own home by looking at it from that distant perspective. Jacob Mikanowski, thanks for joining us, and best wishes with your book, Goodbye Eastern Europe. Thank you so much. It's been really great.

31:32Rick Steves:It's been said that a sense of longing keeps the Welsh feeling unfinished but not undone. An educator from Massachusetts explains how she felt oddly at home the first time she visited Wales and how a few Welsh words she learned helped her to capture the reasons why. Pamela Petro shares how the hidden contours of the human heart can find a home in Wales. That's next on Travel with Rick Steed. I often say that one of the benefits of travel is that by leaving your home, you gain a better perspective and appreciation of it. But for Pamela Petro, studying in Wales as a college student sparked a sudden and deep complication of her concept of home.

32:15Rick Steves:And as it turned out, the Welsh have a word for that. Over 30 years later, now an author and a teacher of creative writing, her Welsh thing, as her family called it, is as strong as ever. Her new book, The Longfield, is a memoir that burrows into the sheep-dotted Welsh countryside to unearth far-reaching truths about the meaning of home, the meaning of place, of longing, and belonging. Pam, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me, Rick. That was the best introduction to me and my book I've ever heard. Well, it's a delightful book, and I'm eager to just get a little better insight into Wales because clearly you are excited about Wales, and I'm excited to get more excited about Wales.

32:58Rick Steves:Perfect. Set the stage for us. What brought you to Wales initially and then what happened? Great. I knew nothing about Wales. I found a very particular master's degree program there and it was in word and image studies, which I had done as an undergrad. And I went off to Wales thinking it was just this big barnacle on the map next to England. And I knew nothing. I didn't know there was a different culture, a different language that Wales had become the first colony of England in 1282. I knew nothing about that, and I found out. That's amazing to think of the distinct cultures within what we think of as Great Britain, isn't it?

33:38And they are very, very distinct in many different levels.

33:42Rick Steves:Distinct and proud, and you feel that in Wales, and you stumbled onto a concept before you even knew there was a word for it. I love that when you go, man, there should be a word for this. And then somebody goes, oh, yes, there is a word. Tell us about Canebon. Perfectly pronounced. When I got to Wales, I almost recognized the landscape, even though I'd never been there before. And that's because I had always dreamed up an ideal place where I could have a long view of the distant horizon. And in that view, I would be able to understand how the earth worked, how the hills knitted themselves to each other and how rivers sculpted out valleys.

34:25And I could never see any of that growing up in New Jersey because stuff was in the way. Our stuff, the malls and the houses and the roads and the cars. So I never had a sense of that. And I got to Wales and I found it. And I felt utterly at home.

34:44Rick Steves:Was there any reason for that? Do you have Welsh ancestry or had you been exposed to that? Or is it just like you accidentally stumbled onto the place where you have that magic connection? I have no Welsh ancestry, but I'd grown up longing for a sense of geography in a sense and also a sense of history. In New Jersey, the indigenous people were the Lenape people, and there was no trace of them anymore. But in this big open landscape in Wales, I found the Stone Age past and the Iron Age past. The richness. Yeah, and it anchored me. I know from reading through your book you're sort of enchanted by the Menhurs and the Dolmans and the Stonehenge Age kind of big, big stony remnants of a mysterious past that we really can hardly understand but we can imagine are representing quite a rich community Oh, you put your finger on it, Rick That's it It's these big, mysterious rocks out in the landscape and they drew me to them and made me wonder so much And I think that's when I first thought how important my imagination was to me, and maybe I could use it to be a writer someday.

35:56Rick Steves:So, Pamela, we are talking about this unique Welsh word, cnevin. I've got it figured out now. And I guess it goes back to the way that the Welsh noticed that little baby sheep knew exactly which part of the mountain was theirs for some reason, and it was just innate. That's correct. That is probably the most elemental meaning of cnevin. But it can also mean a sense that you have that you feel at home in a place though you've never been there before. Yeah, you write about that. You call it, I believe, the unknown elsewhere, this idea of two definitions of home. I mean, where you live, you know, you have an address where if I want to send you a letter, it'll go there, but where you flourish.

36:39Rick Steves:And you talk about other examples of that in Welsh culture. One travel writer who I admire and have long appreciated is Jan Morris. Tell us how Jan Morris could be dealing with the unknown elsewhere. Ah, Jan Morris was one of my mentors, and I dearly miss her. Jan flourished both in Wales and elsewhere, and I think she was always drawn away and back, almost like a tide. And I think one of the places she experienced that sense of belonging to an unknown elsewhere was in Trieste. in Italy, and her magnificent book, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, is one of the books that I read that inspired me to write The Long Field.

37:24Rick Steves:And personally, she was a trans woman. Yes, yes. She was just such an inspiration to me in so many different ways. Somewhere between Welsh and European, somewhere between explorer and travel writer. Yes. And when we go through life, I guess we have to remember where we send the mail, the address, the physical address. It's a nice place, but not necessarily where we really flourish. That's right. And I believe, as you started the program, saying sometimes we have to travel in order to find home. Those in-between places are the most interesting ones. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're talking with Pamela Petro.

38:11Rick Steves:She's the author and a creative writing teacher at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. That's where she lives, but the place where she flourishes is Wales, which is the inspiration of her latest book. It's called The Longfield, Wales and the Presence of Absence, a memoir. She's been traveling in Wales now for over 30 years, and every summer she co-directs the Dylan Thomas Summer School at the University of Wales. Her website is pamelapetro.com. Take me to a moment, Pamela, in Wales where you do flourish? You know, a favorite activity or an interaction with people where you feel truly, almost crazily at home, even though you're far from New Jersey.

38:55Great. Okay. One of the things I love to do in Wales is drive. I love the twisty, turny roads and leaning into the curves and downshifting up the hills. And whenever I go back to teach the summer school in Wales, I rent a car and I drive up the Tyvee River Valley to the little town of Lampeter, where my summer school is based and where I went to school. And there's a certain point, I'll go around a curve, and I see the hills in the distance, and they glow a certain color green. And I see that green. And I think the same thought, how can I live anywhere but here? How do I live without that green?

39:38Rick Steves:I love that. Now, there's another word that you focus on in your book. In fact, The book is called The Long Field, and there's a word that relates to that, hirith, right? Perfect. You got it. I love whales in spite of my difficulty with getting the first base on the language. But hirith, tell us about hirith. Hirith. It's one of my favorite words. One of its possible meanings is the long field, and that's how the title came about. Hirith means to be in the present moment but longing for something beyond it, something that's in the past, perhaps something that you're always seeking in the future that just slips away from you.

40:18In the past, it could be a home, an actual place. It could be a community of people you once knew. It could be a former, younger self who had dreams that maybe you've outgrown.

40:32Rick Steves:Whoa. It's interesting that, as I think you point out, that you think there's a Welsh word for this, but you don't know if there's an English word for it. I think that's uniquely Welsh. They say hirath exists in the Celtic languages, but there is no word in English. And we approximate it in English with homesickness or longing or nostalgia, but it's more than all those things. You know, to me it's related to Portugal and Fado. If you've been to Portugal and the Fado music, it's the song of the fisher widow. there is a sort of an inexplicable longing, a yearning of the soul in the Fado culture in Portugal.

41:12Rick Steves:I think they have a unique word for that also, saudade. That is exactly right. The linguists say that of the world's 7 ,000 languages, only two are exact cognates, and that's hirai. And I have the Brazilian pronunciation, saudade. So my partner is Brazilian. Oh, okay. Yeah, saudade, I guess the word is. So it's interesting that you wrote, it is Hiraeth that makes you Welsh. So with this, you've sort of found your home, haven't you? Yes, I believe it goes back to that living permanently in one place but flourishing in another. And I love both my homes, and I love best being in between. You know, one thing interesting, as you were talking, it occurred to me, you're able to let that emotion go.

42:03Rick Steves:A lot of people are probably afraid to let that emotion go because they might get unmoored and get out of their comfort zone, frankly. I think that being unmoored and being out of your comfort zone is what leads you to the creative place, and that's the important thing. That's a kind of freedom. That is a freedom right there, to embrace the risk of culture shock, to see it not as something to avoid, but something to embrace. Oh, that's so wise. Yes. See it as the growing pains of a broadening perspective. Absolutely. In Wales, a lot of people feel that hirreith is something that is negative, that it draws the Welsh back into a past of the has-been-and-never-was, of a Wales that might have been had they not become a colony of England.

42:53And I see it, they say it's my inherent American optimism, but I see it as an equation where there's absence, where something's missing, there is a potential for creative invention and imagination. and that can be on a national scale, all the wonderful hymns and poems that Wales has produced, or it could be personal. I've kind of lived my life longing for and imagining a Wales of the mind, and it's what allowed me to write my book.

43:27Rick Steves:So there's something about the personality, the humanity of Wales that's unique that I think is the major attraction for you, more than somebody who goes, oh, I love the architecture, or I love the quality of the beer. or I love that. I love those things, too. The markets and so on, yeah. Pamela Petro's book, The Long Field, Whales in the Presence of Absence, a memoir, was shortlisted for a book of the year in Wales when it came out. Her first book, Travels in an Old Tongue, describes looking for Welsh-speaking communities around the world. Pamela also writes about her travels among storytellers in the American Deep South in Sitting Up with the Dead.

44:03Rick Steves:She posts photos of whales on Instagram and at PamelaPetro.com. You'll find links to Pam's work with this week's show at ricksteves.com slash radio. Pamela, you also write that the concept of hirith can relate to many things. Creative hirith, queer hirith, hirith of immigrants. Talk a little bit about that. Absolutely. I think, for me, one of the exciting things about writing my book was trying to imagine hirith in all different kinds of ways, One of which was maybe Hiraith as the experience of a minority group. And I relate that to myself as a gay woman. But I also in the chapter, that same chapter, I talk about being a minority speaker.

44:49And imagine a country in which the language of that place is only spoken by 25 % of the people. They speak a minority language in their own country. So they have a longing to be part of the majority. But the majority of people have a longing to express themselves in the language that their country gave rise to. And there's just a back and forth longing that Hiraeth really gets to the point of.

45:17Rick Steves:Well, and Wales is a great example of a language that has rebounded. Yes. I think it was on a trajectory towards extinction in the last generation or so. It's remarkable. It's not that it's becoming the first language of Wales, but people communicate in Welsh. It gives a new lease on life, I think, for being Welsh in a globalized society. Diann Wyr, very, very true indeed. And Welsh, or Camryg, as it's pronounced, as it's said in Welsh, is on the uptick. And people have devoted themselves to that. They've campaigned for radio stations and TV stations and bilingual road signs and education especially.

45:58It's wonderful to see my friends raising bilingual children.

46:02Rick Steves:It's a declaration of we are here. Absolutely. We are Welsh. I mean, sure, we've got a British passport, but we are fundamentally the people of Wales. We speak that language. Our children speak that language. Yes. And when you go there next, what you can say when you wake up in the morning, say, Bore da, to everyone you see. It means good morning. Bore da. Bore da. Ah, Bore da. Yes, everyone will love you. Everybody knows sláncha. I mean, that's Irish, but I suppose that's... Is that Welsh too? How do you say cheers? You say, yachida, good health. Yachida, yachida. The English say, yachida, but it's yachida, good health.

46:38Rick Steves:Yachida. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We've been talking with Pamela Petro. Her book is The Longfield, Wales and the Presence of Absence, a memoir. You know, one great thing about going to a country like Wales, it's a complicated, unique culture, and we can speak the language, even if we're a monoglot English speaker. I love to go to a Celtic country because I do get the, sort of the sensation that I'm understanding a foreign language. when I listen to people in a place like Wales talking. And the Welsh, like the Irish, have that wonderful gift of gab where you really enjoy talking, right?

47:09Yes, and the accent is so wonderful. The Welsh accent goes up and down. It's like riding a horse. I feel like people's voices are on horseback, and I love that.

47:20Rick Steves:That's a beautiful way to put it. People's voices are on horseback. Yeah, they clip-clops up and down, up and down the hills, the hilly landscape of Wales. So give me a couple more words you'd share with your students that at a very bare minimum a traveler should be mindful of. What are a couple of words we should know? I would say dioch is hugely important. It means thank you. That can go a long way, too. Dioch. With a little bit of a guttural h at the end. Dioch. We shouldn't be shy about the guttural stuff. No, no, no. It sounds to us like we're being comical or going over the top, but no. Go for it.

47:54Go ahead. Go for it. Dioch. Dioch and kreuso. Croeso means both welcome, as in welcome to Wales, croeso i gamri, welcome to Wales, and also croeso means you're welcome. Croeso. Dioch and croeso are really good to know from a manners point of view.

48:12Rick Steves:The word for Wales itself, the English word is from England's perspective, and it means stranger or foreigner or something like that, and the local word means comrade or part of your team. Thank you for bringing that up. What is the Welsh word for Wales? The Welsh word is Cymru, and it means home of fellow countrymen. But the world knows Wales by what the Angles and the Saxons called it, which is Wales meaning home of the foreigners. Home of the foreigners. That's not right. That's not right at all. Oh, my goodness. Hey, Pamela, as a teacher, you're kind of a tour guide. Let's just wrap up this lovely conversation with a moment in Wales where you're most gratified in your work, where your students, you hope, may be having a transformational experience.

48:58Oh, that's a wonderful way to wrap up. There is nothing richer to me and more satisfying than to bring a group of people to Wales of all ages and watch them fall in love with the place that I love. And we do that out in the countryside at all different places. But I think what came to mind, as you said that, is taking students to Carrick Kennan Castle. It's a Welsh castle on the edge of the Brecon Beacons National Park. And having them write about that, but we write right there in an ancient barn that's now the coffee shop. And one of the students jumped up and said, I can't remember what the walls feel like.

49:38And she ran out and she petted the walls. And she came back with a look on her face that she had just touched ancient history and she knew how to describe it. And to me, I get chills just saying that. That made me so happy.

49:53Rick Steves:I'm almost teary-eyed thinking of the joy you must have had as a teacher. Oh, I think I cried. Seeing your student get a tactile. This is whales. This is the long field. Pamela Petro, thank you so much. And thanks for the inspiration in your book about whales, The Long Field. Diochen Waur. Thank you so, so much, Rick. I've loved every minute.

50:27Rick Steves:Travel with Rick Steves is produced by Tim Tatton, Kaz Morahal and Donna Bardsley at Rick Steves Europe in Edmonds, Washington. Affiliate relations are by Sheila Gerzoff. Website uploads are by Andrew Wakeling and Sherry Quirk. Our theme music is by Jerry Frank. Thanks to Dan Bennett at the Smith College Digital Media Library for helping us out this week. You'll find more about our guests at ricksteves.com slash radio. We'll see you next week with more Travel with Rick Steves. Hey, I'm Rick Steves. Season 13 of my TV series Rick Steves Europe is now out. And this and every season of Public Television's most watched and longest-running travel series is available in its entirety free and ad-free at ricksteves.com.

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