EPISODE 11
August, 18 2021
It’s the middle of August and the height of summer in Europe, and in Portugal, where I live, that means everyone heads to the beach and life slows down. So today I thought I’d record a solo show and reflect back on the past three months and the evolution of the podcast to date, and that would be the first 10 episodes.
TRANSCRIPT
Louise: Hello, welcome to Women Who Walk. I’m Louise Ross, writer and author of Women Who Walk the book, the inspiration for this podcast. And just as I did for the book here, I’ll be interviewing and unpacking the journeys of impressive, intrepid women, who’ve made multiple international moves for work, for adventure, for love, for freedom. You can find show notes to each episode and my books on my website, LouiseRoss.com.
[00:00:46] Hello listeners. Welcome to Episode 11 of Women Who Walk. It’s the middle of August and the height of summer in Europe, and in Portugal, where I live, that means everyone heads to the beach and life slows down. So today I thought I’d record a solo show and reflect back on the past three months and the evolution of the podcast to date, and that would be the first 10 episodes.
Summer in Portugal – photo by Maria-Joao Gamito
[00:01:14] At the beginning of 2021, I was already an enthusiastic podcast listener, but I was entirely new to the craft of hosting and producing my own show. Needless to say, once I decided back in February to create Women Who Walk, the months ahead offered up a steep learning curve.
[00:01:36] I’ve had to get my head around the technology, including figuring out how to use my external microphone properly. I can’t believe I’m sharing this with you, but after Episode nine went live, I learned that I’d had my microphone rotated away from my mouth, which explains why in the first nine episodes, I sound a bit muffled.
[00:01:59] Blunders aside I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the whole process of upskilling, perhaps more so because I’ve had excellent support from my young virtual assistant and assistant producer, Artemis Savory. Listeners, Artemis is a millennial and I’m a baby boomer, and seriously, the older you get, the more you realize how invaluable it is to have a tech-savvy Gen-Y on your team. Thanks for all your help, Artemis.
[00:02:30] What I’ve enjoyed most about podcasting is the conversations I’ve had with my guests. During this second pandemic year, and as a single woman living alone, the isolation has at times been challenging, because like the rest of the world here in Portugal, we’ve gone into periodic lockdowns, which has meant in-person contact with friends has been at a minimum. Thankfully, that’s starting to change with Portugal loosening its restrictions.
[00:03:01] So over the past months and going forward, the beauty of interviewing for Women Who Walk is that I’ve had the opportunity to have in-depth conversations, unpacking the lives of women living around the world. And this has meant, I’ve also had the chance to travel vicariously to the countries in which my guests live or spend extended periods.
[00:03:26] And thus far, because most of my interviewees are women I know, some of whom I haven’t spoken to or seen in person for quite some time, we’ve been able to catch up during the pre- and-post interview chat.
[00:03:52] In Episode 2, I talk with long-time friend Boston-born, Carolyn McCarthy. Carolyn has been based in rural Chile for about 15 years where she has an awe-inspiring view of Orsono volcano. She says in her episode that it looks a bit like Mount Fuji in Japan, which it really does. On my website, there’s a spectacular picture she took of Orsono embedded in the transcript of her episode. Her house is built on the flanks of a different volcano called Calbuco. And that one erupted in April, 2015.
[00:04:33] We Skyped a few days after the eruption and I was not surprised to see and hear her visibly shaken. Fortunately, her house only suffered minor damage to the roof from spewed rocks, but some neighbors were not so lucky. Six years on the land around her house is as it was before the eruption, though now there’s a few more rocks about.
[00:05:00] These days, Carolyn mostly works from home, looking out at her amazing view, as Global Communications Coordinator for a conservation foundation that focuses on restoring native flora and fauna species to Southern Chile and Argentina.
[00:05:20] Carolyn is someone I met more than 20 years ago when I lived in Colorado, where we both worked at the Economics Institute, a preparatory school for international students. I talk a bit about my role at the Institute in Episode 1, which is also a solo show. Though by the time I started my job at the Institute, Carolyn had already left for South America. So we didn’t actually meet until later, when she was back in the US to see friends and family. By then we had a reason to meet. Carolyn had left her skis at the Institute, propped up in a colleague’s cubicle with a “For Sale” sign adhered to them. I noticed this with interest and decided to buy her skis, which I did when we finally met.
Louise and Carolyn, Boulder, Colorado, circa 2004
[00:06:10] Boulder, where I lived and worked in Colorado, is smack up against the foothills to the Rocky Mountains and within a couple of hours drive there’s great skiing, my favorite winter sport back then. The curious thing is that Carolyn is about 10 centimeters shorter than me and her skis barely reached the top of my head. But I was ready to ditch my long and heavy skis in favor of shorter and lighter ones. The point is buying Carolyn’s skis forged a friendship that has spanned more than 20 years and several countries.
[00:06:49] I haven’t seen Carolyn since moving to Portugal in 2014. Periodically, we do talk via Skype and then it’s mostly chitty chat. So to have the chance to interview her about her extensive journeying through the Americas, writing for Lonely Planet Guide Books, and her more recent work with Tompkins Conservation was a real treat, as there were things that she shared about her life, her travels and her work that were new to me, despite knowing her for a couple of decades.
[00:07:25] That was also the case when I interviewed Londoner, Samantha Coomber, in Episode 6. I’ve known Sammy for about 40 years. We tried to avoid mentioning our actual age during the interview. I think it was enough to reveal how long we’ve known each other.
[00:07:44] Skiing was also the backdrop to my meeting Sammy, as we both worked for a British ski company in the French Alps. Ski Bonne Neige ran four chalets, employing two girls per chalet to prepare breakfast, afternoon tea, and dinner each day, and generally take care of the guests and the chalet, keeping it clean, comfy, and homey.
[00:08:08] At the beginning of the season, I ran my chalet solo, which was very demanding, given that it accommodated up to 18 guests. So I asked my boss for an assistant and one day Samantha, who had just arrived in Courcheval, turned up at my chalet, announcing she was on deck to help.
[00:08:29] Sammy and I forged a friendship because we worked together and because we found plenty of reasons to laugh, especially at ourselves and at each other, perhaps indicative of how carefree we were in our early 20s. Plus our April birthdays are a day apart and that connected us too.
[00:08:49] When the winter season was over, we went our separate ways, but we kept in touch via hand written letters. About 10 years later, when I was living in Boulder, she came to stay for a week. Ten years after that, she was living in Vietnam, building her career as an Asia Pacific Travel and Lifestyle Writer.
Louise and Samantha, winter 1992, Boulder, Colorado
[00:09:23] In 2004, I was in Guangzhou and Shenzen, the manufacturing hubs of Southern China, hoping to find a factory that would work with me to produce a line of lingerie, which I intended selling as spin-off merchandise branded with the illustrated image of the protagonist from a couple of rom-com novels I’d written.
[00:09:45] My American agent, a young, tall and skinny guy who spoke Mandarin, and who the Chinese called “white devil,” because of his blonde hair and blue eyes, did all the talking and negotiating for me, especially important in 2004, since the Chinese men running the garment factories were not accustomed to doing business with a Western woman.
[00:10:10] Not having any luck on mainland China, Tim, my agent, suggested we venture into Hong Kong. It was a good call as I had more success there with a small factory run by a very congenial husband and wife team.
[00:10:25] From Hong Kong, I’d planned to fly back to Colorado via Northern Vietnam. At that time, Sammy was living in Hanoi. She’d reserved a room for me at a traditional Vietnamese guesthouse situated near her apartment. We talked about what we do for the week that I planned to be there, but just days before I was due to fly, the December 26th, Indian Ocean tsunami and earthquake struck, devastating parts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand.
[00:10:57] It was the world’s deadliest tsunami with over 230,000 people killed and half a million injured by the waves that battered the low-lying coastal regions. My booked flight was Hong Kong to Bangkok, Bangkok to Hanoi, but flights were canceled and re-routed because of the destruction in the region and because of a cholera outbreak in Bangkok. I never made it to Hanoi. It was just impossible for me to get there at that time. Luckily for Sammy, Hanoi was too far north to be directly affected by the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami.
[00:11:36] I hadn’t seen or spoken to Sammy since she came to visit me in Colorado in the early ’90s, and so catching up with her three months ago in preparation for her Women Who Walk interview was quite a reunion. On our initial call, I could clearly hear the sounds of her neighborhood in Ho Chi Minh city, which is where she’s lived for many years. In particular, I could hear the motor scooters whizzing around the streets. It’s a densely populated area on a bustling canal and when in her interview, she talks about her love of her adopted city, you can’t help but hear in her voice how Vietnam has captured her heart.
[00:12:18]
[00:12:30] Listeners will have noticed that at the beginning of each episode, I have guests describe where they live, perhaps their neighborhood, what they see out their windows. I do this because it gives each interview a setting, and a sense of place that we can visualize.
[00:12:47] When I was a kid growing up in rural Australia, we didn’t have TV. We did have radio. And each morning before school, I loved listening to a program that employed a reader with a very melodic voice to read a classic Australian novel over a period of weeks. I guess it was a bit like listening to an audio book today while commuting. The descriptions of place during those morning readings were so evocative and left such an impression on me, that I knew I wanted to create a similar ambience at the beginning of each of my podcast episodes.
[00:13:24] In Episode 4, my guest Andrea Barton, talks about her years writing, producing for the stage and dancing her way through Nigeria, Texas, and the Middle East. When she and her family repatriated to Australia, they returned to their home in Mansfield, a town known as the gateway to the high country in the state of Victoria.
[00:13:47] Some listeners may remember an iconic Australian movie called The Man From Snowy River. Well, it was shot in the high country, above Mansfield. Most iconic in that film are the aerial scenes of horses thundering through and down the mountains. Equally symbolic of Australia is the scene Andrea describes out the windows of her home office in Mansfield. “It’s a beautiful setting,” she says. “Very Australian with lots of gumtrees. And there’s actually some kangaroos hopping about our front paddock at the moment.”
[00:14:23] Andrea is not someone I’ve met in person, but we’ve grown to know one another online, via a Facebook group that Andrea created and which she invited me to join. It’s called Expat Writers and she describes it as a group for bloggers, authors, editors, memoir writers, or anyone who puts fingers to keyboard about their experiences, living away from home and writing as an expat. The group is growing. And it’s a very supportive space for participants.
[00:14:55] In Episode 7, I interview another Australian. Someone I met in person in January, 2015. Jodie and her wife, Natalie, are international housesitters. And during a very lonely first winter here in Portugal, a mutual friend introduced us on Facebook.
[00:15:15] The upshot of that online introduction was an invitation to visit Nat and Jody while they were housesitting on the island of Evia, just outside Athens in Greece. I talk about that snowy winter visit in the introduction to Jodie’s episode. Tragically, Evia has been in the news the last couple of weeks, because of raging summer fires that have destroyed thousands of acres of forest across the north of the island, forcing the evacuation of many villages.
[00:15:45] But in May this year, when I interviewed Jodie, the view beyond where she and Nat were house- sitting at the time was unbelievably spectacular. The city of Guanajuato in Mexico, sprawls over steep hillsides, and it’s dotted with sherbet-colored Spanish colonial-style buildings. Nat took the picture of the city that I embedded in the transcript of Jodie’s episode on my website. It’s of Guanajuato dwarfed by a massive midnight-blue/black ominous looking storm cloud about to explode in the hills above the city.
[00:16:24] In Episode 8, I have a fascinating conversation with Chicagoan Diana Driscoll, who I’ve known for a number of years because, like Jodie and Nat, I also do a bit of housesitting, but nowadays just for Diana, who lives in London. Partway into my interview, I ask Diana about another kind of blue. Not storm cloud, midnight-blue/black, but an extraordinary turquoise blue that she’s very familiar with because it’s the dominant color in tiles that adorn the domes of Mosques in Uzbekistan, where Diana travels to several times a year as a tour leader and expert lecturer on the trade routes of Central Asia and the history of The Silk Road.
[00:17:11] I first met Diana when I took her 8-person tour through Berber and Islamic Morocco in 2015. And I have in mind that at some point I’d love to do her tour of Uzbekistan and see firsthand the beauty of Central Asia, it’s culture, architecture, those gorgeous turquoise, tiled mosques, and hear more about the history of this region, which Diana talks about with such passion.
Berber village, Atlas Mountains, Morocco 2015, with Diana Driscoll (far L), Louise (far R)
[00:17:39] An image of another place of worship adorned inside and out with extraordinary, exuberantly- colored tiles accompanies Episode 5. The Church of the Resurrection in St. Petersburg, is where Russia’s famed novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky died in 1881. My Portuguese-born, American guest and friend, Joia Lewis, studied Russian Language and Literature in Moscow. Her episode is titled, “In Search of Dostoevsky’s Russia.” The reason I titled it that becomes clear in her interview, suffice it to say that the “Big D,” as she refers to Dostoevsky, is the writer and thinker behind lots of her ideas as a Professor of the Philosophy of Science.
[00:18:28] You can see the image I took in 2013 of the Church of the Resurrection when, like every tourist in St. Petersburg, I was awe-struck by its sheer splendor. It features on Joia’s videogram on my YouTube channel, which you can find by typing in Louise Ross, Writer. And they’re under the Women Who Walk playlist, you’ll find all the podcast episodes as videograms, which is very convenient if you prefer to listen to an interview while simultaneously reading closed captions of the transcript.
[00:19:04] At a time when we still can’t travel easily. And some can’t travel at all, allowing our imaginations to be evoked by intimate, firsthand descriptions of places, cities and neighborhoods in countries afar is delightfully transporting. And for this reason, I’m very grateful to the women I interview for their multiple moves abroad, their international lives and adventures; for the valuable work that they do and for sharing their stories about all of this and more on Women Who Walk.
[00:19:37] Ah, and speaking of valuable work, I haven’t mentioned Episode 10, featuring French-Italian entrepreneur, Marie-Pierre Nicoletti, and Episode 9 with Danish-Egyptian Human Rights Lawyer and Middle East expert, Yasmin Abdel-Hak, and Episode 2 with Anouk Cleven from the Netherlands. These three women have given an enormous amount as dedicated professionals, educators, volunteers, and visionaries in the many countries and cities in which they’ve lived and worked.
[00:20:10] As I finish up, I thought I’d share some numbers with you. My podcast hosting site tells me that in the 12 weeks since its launch, Women Who Walk has achieved over 500 downloads in 155 cities in 18 countries around the world. Listeners, wherever you are, thank you for tuning in. And so you don’t miss future episodes with more impressive, intrepid women, do subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or on your favorite podcast provider.
[00:20:43] And feel free to rate and review Women Who Walk on either Apple Podcasts or Podchaser, since these are actually the only two sites on which you can leave a podcast review. I’ve linked to them both in the transcript to this episode, which you can find on my website, LouiseRoss.com
[00:21:01] Until next episode, thank you for listening to Women Who Walk.
[00:21:05] Thank you for listening today. And if you would like to read a transcript of this episode, you can find it in the show notes on my website, LouiseRoss.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review Women Who Walk on your preferred podcast provider.