731 Hiking Iceland; Disappearing Asia; England Journeys & Slang

Travel with Rick Steves

Rick Steves

Rick Steves, Public Radio, 721132, Europe, Society & Culture, Places & Travel, Npr, Travel

4.3 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 October 2023

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A creative-writing professor discusses Icelandic mythology, as told in the Viking-inspired sagas — and how a summer backpacking trek around the island nation helped him understand the role these tales play in Iceland's modern-day culture. Then futurist and Wired founder Kevin Kelly looks back on his journeys to document, over nearly 50 years, many of the traditions and features now quickly vanishing across Asia. And experts share advice for fall travels to England's gardens and stone circles, and for understanding British slang.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	On a humanity esteemed trip to Iceland, creative writing professor Kurt Caswell was lucky enough to view the medieval manuscripts of their folklore, the Saga's.
0:10.0	You're touching, you're crossing this almost impenetrable boundary of time.
0:15.0	Coming up, he tells us about his epic journey around Iceland.
0:19.0	Kevin Kelly realized that those thousands of photos he took years ago, while backpacking across Asia, can now document a lot of what's vanishing in a changing world.
0:28.0	Over time, I realized I was capturing things that were rare and disappearing.
0:33.0	He shares what the modernization of Asia is changing from its past.
0:37.0	And a British expat explains why you might stir up some confusion when you use a word that sits on the language barrier between the US and the UK.
0:45.0	Brits get a lot of exposure to American television and this kind of stuff, but certainly you'll get a double take if you use that.
0:50.0	Spend a crack in good hour with us. It's travel with Rick Steves.
1:00.0	Going through his old photos, Kevin Kelly had thousands of pictures from nearly 50 years of traveling across Asia.
1:08.0	He's put his favorites into a stunning and massive photo book collection.
1:12.0	Kevin joins us in a bit to explain how those pictures can show us a lot of what's disappearing from the scene.
1:18.0	And we promised to get Jeff'd for a trip to Britain a little later in the hour.
1:23.0	Let's start today's travel with Rick Steves in Iceland.
1:26.0	A creative writing professor from Northern Texas found that hiking in Iceland's otherworldly landscapes took him into a hot bed of imagination fed by hundreds of years of elaborate mythology.
1:38.0	It's what he found written in the country's much celebrated sagas.
1:43.0	Exploring the back country of Iceland along its 800 mile long ring road is becoming a must-do experience for more and more adventure travelers.
1:51.0	For Kurt Caswell, Iceland offered a mix of literary thrills and natural thrills.
1:57.0	As a professor of creative writing literature at Texas Tech, Kurt combined humanities studies in the medieval texts that underlie Icelandic culture
2:06.0	with an extended backpacking trip to experience the raw beauty of the island.
2:11.0	Kurt writes about his ring road travels in Iceland in his memoir and it's called Iceland Summer.
2:17.0	Kurt, thanks for being with us on Travel with Rick Steves.
	...

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