10 hours. 10 hours is how long I've spent editing this 12-minute episode together. Wow. Now I know why the record-and-release style of podcasting is so popular. And why I've always let someone else do the production work. This is hard.
On this, the fourth episode of the ShEvo Studio On Tour podcast, we talk about water, improved health conditions, taking wrong turns, and the excitement found when shopping for groceries. A riveting way to spend twelve minutes of your time, to be sure.
[Jesus Christ, more farmland photos?]
EVO: We’re officially one week into our grand tour of, well… the world. If you’re just joining us, we’re currently in France. Specifically, we’re about as far northwest as you can get, in the middle of a small peninsula of land known as Brittany, or Bretagne. Yes I mean France, not the UK, though this area does share some history with Britain. But you can look all that up on Wikipedia. You didn’t come to us for a history lesson. We’ve been referring to this as the French country side. Which is really just a fancy term for farmland. Really, really clean farm land.
[Clean]
SHE : And it’s not only clean, it’s moist. Like, really, really wet. We’ve had rain or drizzle at least half the days we’ve been here. The soil is soaked, and I’m not sure I packed the proper footwear for such a boggy place. My boots have seen better days. Water does more than stand and soak. It flows. At every turn, it seems there’s a brook, stream, or some other type of rushing water.
[Water]
EVO: Here’s a tip: when recording sounds of water, make sure you’ve emptied your bladder. Because… wow.
SHE: All that water is why it’s so green here, even in the dead of winter. And it’s also why my sinuses are vastly improved.
[sinuses]
EVO: On this oddly rain-free day, we decide to walk the road north. We’d been south -- that’s where the actual town of Corlay lies just a few blocks away -- but today we were exploring La Haut-Corlay, which isn’t much more than a handful of houses high on a hill. That’s what La Haut-Corlay means “the high” Corlay. Not quite the upper east side, but you get the picture. Anyhow, we had studied a few Google maps from the house where we had internet connection -- internet connectivity on mobile devices is spotty just past the outskirts of town -- and knew basically where we were going. All we had to do was head north and turn left on a road that I was pretty sure had the world “river” in it.
[not lost]
EVO: Yes, street signs are helpful, but only if you know how to read them. Mon francais is pourri, and it wasn’t long before self-doubt crept in.
[Joan Rivers]
SHE: Evo is one of the more confident people I’ve known. But he’s not infallible, especially when it comes to reading signs in French. As it turns out, the road we thought we were on wasn’t actually a “road” at all...
[not the same thing]
SHE: But clearly we weren’t too lost, as we were able to make it back and record this podcast episode. But signs aren’t the only thing that’s tripped us up since we’ve been in France. Even simple things, like a trip to the grocery store, has it’s own little quirks we’ve had to discover in the moment. The Super U contained the same things we expected to see, except for one thing:
[shopping cart trek]
EVO: No, it wasn’t Screw With The Americans day. We thought the parking lot looked rather devoid of stray shopping carts. Upon further inspection, we found that everyone actually returns their carts to the parking lot corrals. Not because they’re courteous, but because they are incentivized to do so. To unlock a cart requires a one Euro coin. When placed in a small slot on the handle, the cart disconnects from the rest. But it’s not a vending machine. Your coin stays peeking at you the whole time you’re shopping. To get it back, you have to return the cart to the corral and re-chain it to the mass of carts. When you do -- and only if you do -- your coin pops out. Brilliant!
SHE: One last bit before we go: We were entertained by the ethnic food section of the French supermarket, which was probably more comical to us than it should have been.
[Ethnic section]
EVO: As it turns out, there was no American section. Which is probably for the best. But we have food for the remainder of our time here. We’ll have one more episode from France for you next week, then the following episode will be assembled in Denmark. You know, where speak even less of the local language. That’ll be our fifth episode, at which time we’ll probably ask you to tell a few dozen of your friends about our show. Five in the can, that’s the rule before promotion begins. At least that was the rule when I started podcasting 10 years ago. I suppose it would be OK if you told just one friend about us right now. Sure. That should be OK. Jusqu'à la prochaine fois! (That means until next time… I think...)
[outro]
New episodes of the ShEvo Studios On Tour Podcast are available every Sunday. Of course, Sunday can be a very different thing depending on where we are in the world. Cheers!
