Podcast #011: Crossing Borders

A bridge over the River Rhine, marking the border between Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Mountains in the background. Quite pretty.

Welcome to Episode 11 of my “Travel Tales From Beyond The Brochure” podcast.

I’m aware it’s been a while since my last podcast, but I have been travelling quite a bit (plus I was a little concerned when at one point my voice recorder stopped working, but it turned out to be simply a problem with the battery casing and nothing that a small piece of cardboard couldn’t resolve). Much of that travel was on an inter-rail trip around Europe, which had me visiting quite a few countries, and thus crossing a number of international borders. This encouraged me to crack on with this podcast episode once I’d come back, especially as one of my recent blog posts was also about border crossings, but in West Africa.

As you know, borders have always fascinated me, as they’re at ‘the edge’, so everything beyond them can be seen as ‘new’, and ‘shiny’. I wanted to create a podcast where both me and the people I knew could talk about their experiences of crossing borders, highlighting how each border is different and even the crossing of the same border can feel very different to different people.

Note that due to time constraints and to prevent a sharp mood change halfway through, this is the first in a two-part discussion on borders – the next pod is about the political aspects of borders, how some of them came about, how people feel about them, and what they mean for the people who try to cross them.

So, in the pod, I talk about:
* My recent inter-rail trip in general (though at some point there’ll be a pod or blog post on it specifically)
* Returning home to the General Election and my feelings on the whole ‘is this the right place for me any more’ – “should I stay or should I go?”
* Thinking about a ‘conceptual’ to-do list – which will be expanded on next time
* Crossing borders in the Schengen Zone Area, including the lack of passport stamps
* Local (internal administrative) borders and how even they can show a change in the landscape
* My experiences of crossing international borders in West Africa, Central Asia, North America, and Europe pre-Schengen.

You can listen via the feed above, or via Spotify, or on your podcast app of choice 🙂 Let me know if it isn’t, by the way, and I’ll see what I can do.

As always, if you have anything to say about the topic, or indeed about my podcasting in general, leave a comment or let me know. There is a Facebook group for my podcast that you’re free to join: Click here!

Contributions in this podcast came from:
* Laura at ‘Tumbleweed Chronicles’
* Kerry from ‘Kerry Somewhere’
* Nat from ‘NatPacker Travel’
* Steven, at ‘Steven On The Move’
* Amanda, from ‘Not A Ballerina’, and
* Alexi, from ‘Travel Lexx’

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