A Clean, Well-Moistened Place [Season 1, Episode 4] - a podcast by Sheila Dee & Evo Terra - Third World Survivors
from 2015-01-25T17:53
Full Show Script
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[Jesus Christ, more farmland photos?]
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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.
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[Clean]
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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.
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[Water]
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EVO: Here’s a tip: when recording sounds of water, make sure you’ve emptied your bladder. Because… wow.
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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.
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[sinuses]
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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.
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[not lost]
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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.
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[Joan Rivers]
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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...
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[not the same thing]
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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:
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[shopping cart trek]
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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...
Further episodes of ShEvo vs. The First World | A Skeptical Look at Western Culture
Further podcasts by Sheila Dee & Evo Terra - Third World Survivors