The Great Reverse Migration
The Europeans | European news, politics and culture
Katy Lee and Dominic Kraemer
0.0 • 0 Ratings
🗓️ 25 March 2021
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For decades, Eastern Europe has suffered a massive brain drain of people heading abroad in search of opportunity. But something remarkable happened during the pandemic: huge numbers started coming back. Can they be convinced to stay? This week we speak to urban researcher Ognyan Georgiev about his fascinating work tracking Bulgaria's returnees — and we get his predictions for which European cities are going to be the coolest in 20 years time. We're also talking about sexism in German football, Iceland's spectacular volcano eruption, and why Finland has yet again been named the world's happiest country.
This week's Isolation Inspiration: Oscar-nominated Romanian film Collective; My Family And Other Animals; and the fabulous music of our Patreon supporter (and newest jingle composer) Mariska Martina: instagram.com/mariskamartina
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.
Producer: Katz Laszlo
Assistant producers: Andrei Popoviciu and Priyanka Shankar
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome everyone to another edition of the Europeans. |
| 0:26.4 | Nice that you have joined us for your weekly dose of tales from across this continent that Katie and I call home. |
| 0:33.9 | I'm Dominic. I'm an opera singer and podcaster living in Amsterdam. |
| 0:36.9 | And I'm speaking down the Skype line to co-host Katie, a journalist living in Paris. |
| 0:43.0 | Hello. |
| 0:43.5 | We've got quite a lot of flack this week for using Skype, haven't we? |
| 0:47.4 | People have been so rude about the fact that we use Skype. So I just want to say once and for all, it's an excellent piece of technology, and we're |
| 0:55.1 | very wedded to it. |
| 0:56.0 | It's not going away. |
| 0:57.2 | It is owned by Microsoft now, but I looked it up and it still has 44% of its employees |
| 1:02.0 | in Estonia. |
| 1:02.6 | So I don't think we should feel too bad about it. |
| 1:04.6 | I think it's the natural choice for us. |
| 1:06.4 | Also, we use its ringtone as one of our jingles, so we can't get rid of it. Yeah, Zoom doesn't have a good jingle. |
| 1:12.6 | Boo. |
| 1:13.6 | Anyway, how are you, Katie? |
| 1:14.6 | I'm fine. I had my long-awaited French nationality interview in the end this week. |
| 1:18.6 | Are you French now? |
| 1:19.6 | No, it's just a waiting game now. I just have to wait for a year and hope that everything is going to be okay. But the interview itself went fine. I'm glad that I spent so long |
| 1:27.5 | cramming because I did get some quite tough questions like who was president in 1975. And what did |
| 1:34.5 | Mary Curie get her two Nobel prizes for? And who actually wrote the French national anthem. |
| 1:39.2 | So quite tough things. But she was very nice. The lady at the Previteur who did the interview. |
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