COVID Stories Part 4

12/06/21 • 19 min

1 Listener

Nearly 2 years into the Covid-19 pandemic, new waves of infection continue to spread around the world, and the Omicron variant is causing renewed fears in places that previously thought they had the virus under control. So I’m releasing another episode in my series where I check in with friends and colleagues around the world to get a sense of what things are like where they live. This time we hear voices from Thailand, Ukraine, Guatemala, Belgium, Finland, and Vietnam. If you’ve missed the previous three installments of my COVID Stories series, you can check them out in my season 3 archive.

If you’re a regular listener of my show, I’d love to hear your feedback on this series. Do you enjoy it, or are you tired of it, and you think I should move on to something else? You can let me know by emailing me at [email protected]

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On Far From Home, award-winning public radio journalist Scott Gurian documents fascinating stories from far-flung places like Iran, Chernobyl, and Mongolia. For more info, visit farfromhomepodcast.org

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Previous Episode

Playing Tour Guide (with The Radio Vagabond)

Having grown up just outside of New York City, I visited most of the big tourist attractions like the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and Rockefeller Center when I was a kid. But when you spend a lot of time in a place and get to know it well, you start to discover some really cool but lesser-known areas, and those are the ones I always like to share with friends when they come from out of town.

Recently, I played tour guide for my colleague Palle Bo, who’s the host of The Radio Vagabond podcast and has been to nearly 100 countries. If you’re a longtime listener of my show, you may remember his episode I shared a while back about the time he and his daughter joined a tour group in North Korea.

Palle had been to New York several times before, so I figured I would get him out of Manhattan where most of the other tourists stay and bring him to see some interesting sites in the city’s outer boroughs. He ended up making a podcast episode about our experience that I really enjoyed, so I’m re-sharing it in my feed. You can read more and see some photos from some of the places Palle and I visited on his website.

If you’re new to Far From Home and want to hear some of my past episodes that Palle mentioned, check out my first season where I told the story of my road trip to Mongolia including the time my friends and I were asked to pay a bribe in Tajikistan, my episode about the time I made a fool of myself trying to learn the ancient art of Tuvan throat singing, and the time I participated in a hallucinogenic healing ceremony in Peru.

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Next Episode

Cell Phone Santa

Take Santa Claus. Then ditch the red suit and the flying reindeer, and you’ve got a guy who’s all about giving. On this last episode of my third season, I tell the story of the time my dad tried out the role and got more than he bargained for!

This story originally aired many years ago on NPR’s Day to Day. Thanks to my editor Russell Lewis.

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