The best rainy city in the world
The Europeans | European news, politics and culture
Katy Lee and Dominic Kraemer
4.8 • 162 Ratings
🗓️ 10 June 2021
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jens Thoms Ivarsson has one of this continent's most fascinating jobs: chief "rain man" for the city of Gothenburg. We chat to the creative director of Rain Gothenburg about the Swedish city's rather wonderful plan to become the best place in the world when it's raining. Also this week: expensive Finnish breakfasts, accidental asparagus, and why Budapest's plans to build a Chinese university campus have gone down so badly.
This week's Isolation Inspiration: "Inside the last matriarchy in Europe", Zero, and "Portrait of a pigeon racer".
You can read about Rain Gothenburg here in The Guardian.
This episode was produced as part of Sphera, a brand-new collective of independent European media. Find out more at sphera-hub.com.
Thanks for listening! If you enjoy our podcast and would like to help us keep making it, we'd love it if you'd consider chipping in a few euros / dollars / pounds a month at patreon.com/europeanspodcast. You can also help new listeners find the show by leaving us a review.
Senior producer: Katz Laszlo
Producers: Andrei Popoviciu and Priyanka Shankar
Music: Jim Barne and Mariska Martina
This podcast is part of the Are We Europe family. Find more like-minded European podcasts at areweeurope.com/audio-family.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is a part of Sphira. |
| 0:01.8 | A collective of independent media outlets from across Europe. |
| 0:05.8 | Some more information. |
| 0:06.9 | Visit Svira-hub.com. Hello Katie. |
| 0:32.1 | Hello, from sunny London. |
| 0:34.0 | Yeah, it feels rather inappropriate on this incredibly sunny day here also in Amsterdam that |
| 0:39.1 | we've decided to make an episode about rain this week. It's so ill-timed. But I guess we've got |
| 0:46.0 | listeners all over the world and somewhere one of them will be listening with the pitter-patter |
| 0:51.0 | of rain on their windows. It's like the opposite of, what's it called? It's |
| 0:55.1 | always sunny in Philadelphia. It's the opposite of that. It's always raining somewhere in Europe. |
| 0:59.1 | Very true. So yeah, this episode is for you guys listening in rainy places. I'm sorry you're |
| 1:04.5 | missing out on the wonderful sun that Katie and I both have. But we are heading to Gothenburg in |
| 1:09.6 | Sweden to speak to Jens, Tom's Ivarcheon, a man who has been |
| 1:13.8 | given a most brilliantly bizarre job by the city of Gothenburg. As part of the city's 400-year |
| 1:20.6 | anniversary celebrations, he's been put in charge of trying to make Gothenburg the best city in |
| 1:27.3 | the world when it rains. |
| 1:29.2 | I love this idea. |
| 1:30.4 | We're going to be having a nice chat with him later on in the show to find out a bit more |
| 1:34.4 | about this intriguing sounding brief. |
| 1:41.7 | Who's had a good week, Katie? |
| 1:47.9 | I am giving good week to people power in Budapest because thousands of people came out onto |
| 1:53.1 | the streets over the weekend in the Hungarian capital in protest over these big plans to |
... |
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