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Rick Steves’ Travel Blog

Here you can browse through my blog posts prior to February 2022. Currently I'm sharing my travel experiences, candid opinions, and what's on my mind solely on my Facebook page. — Rick

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Let’s Play Twenty Questions!

Magazines love giving their readers a behind-the-scenes glimpse at people they might find interesting. So I get a lot of magazine writers sending me lists of quirky and personal questions. Here’s an example of an interview I just did. I thought, if this magazine’s readers get these answers, my blog readers should too. So here goes:

1) Where would you rather be right now? Right where I am. I’ve been on the road for five of the last seven months, and I’m happy to be home.

2) Famous person (dead or alive, real or fictional) you’d most like to go on a trip with? Napoleon to Russia…perhaps to Moscow for Christmas.

3) Tourist must-see you think is actually a “must-skip”? Orlando.

4) Everyone asks what’s #1 on your list of places you want to go before you die. But what’s your #3? The cruise from Seattle to Alaska.

5) You’d be mortified if people knew you did what when you traveled? Steal lunch from the breakfast buffet.

6) Your most stranded, “oh-my-[deity]” travel moment? On the overnight ferry ride from Norway to Denmark, I slept through Denmark and woke up halfway back to Norway. I was very tired. It was embarrassing to go downstairs to the ferry car deck and see my car being the only one out of a hundred facing the other way. It cost me a day of my itinerary…but gave me a fun memory.

7) Best (or worst) person/people you’ve had to sit next to while traveling? I was surrounded by a bunch of very frightening Russian no-necks on a flight from Tallinn in Estonia. One got a phone call, and his ringtone was the sound of a rifle being cocked. They made me want to crawl into the place under my seat where the life jacket is stowed.

8) Strangest meal abroad? Sitting at a cafeteria in Kabul, I was joined by an Afghan professor who took it upon himself to spend the entire meal explaining to me that “one-third of the people on this planet eat with spoons and forks like you, one third eat with chopsticks, and one third eat with their fingers like me — and we’re all civilized just the same.”

9) If someone was visiting your town, what’s the one thing you’d show them? I’d take them to the baseball stadium and show them a good time with really American food.

10) Travel-related invention you wish existed? A powder that would wash your clothes simply by the rubbing action that comes with wearing them.

11) Your most embarrassing travel faux pas? Having the exciting opportunity to eat lunch with a big-city travel editor when I was just getting started, reviewing the menu, and — upon seeing “quiche” — asking, “What’s kwee-shee?”

12) Material thing you miss the most when away from home? My piano.

13) Most unique souvenir? The horns of a bull I saw killed in the ring in Sevilla and then slaughtered out back.

14) Best celebrity encounter while traveling? Being in a crypt surrounded by urns filled with the vital organs of centuries of Habsburg kings and queens.

15) Most unusual item you have travelled with? Mukluks (wool slippers with leather bottoms).

16) Coolest mode of transport you’ve taken? A trenino on the Italian Riviera (the tiny monorail train that takes vintners up the hills when working their vineyards).

17) The place you don’t want anyone to know about but are willing to divulge here? Orlando.

18) Travel-related film or book that inspires you to pack your bags? Movies: Yol for Turkey, Singing Revolution for Estonia, The Way for Galicia in northwest Spain, and three movies by Deepa Mehta for India: Water, Fire, and Earth.

19) The travel story you’ll never stop bragging about? How I got to give the Christkind (the Bavarian princess of Christmas…and quite a celebrity there) a kiss on the cheek.

20) Lay on us a few priceless bits of travel advice or wisdom.  If you equip yourself with good information and expect yourself to travel smart, you can. There are two IQs for European travelers: those who wait in lines, and those who don’t wait in lines. Fear is for people who don’t get out much.

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Warning: Email Scams About Travelers in Distress

We are all caring and compassionate people who would come to the aid of a friend in an instant. That’s what Internet con artists prey on. If you ever receive an email ostensibly from a friend or relative in a foreign land who is in a cash bind and asks you to wire them money — ignore it. Let your friend know that their email account has been hijacked and their friends are at risk of being scammed. Here is an email I just received that appears to be from someone I know, but which actually tries to fool loved ones into giving money to crooks. It’s obviously a scam. Beware. This is just one of countless versions of this trick.

Hi Friend,

I hope this finds you well. I am presently in Madrid in Spain with my ill Cousin. She’s suffering from a critical uterine fibroid and must undergo hysterectomy surgery to save her life. I am deeply sorry for not writing or calling you before leaving, the news of her illness arrived to me as an emergency and that she needs family support to keep her going, I hope you understand my plight and pardon me.

 

Hysterectomy surgery is very expensive here, so I want to transfer her back home to have the surgery implemented in the USA. I am wondering if you can be of any assistance to me, I need about €2,850 to make the necessary arrangement; I traveled with little money due to the short time I had to prepare for this trip and never expected things to be the way it is right now. I’ll surely pay you back once I get back home, I need to get her home ASAP because she is going through a lot of pain at the moment and the doctor have advised that it is necessary  the tumor is operated soon to avoid anything from going wrong. I’ll reimburse you at my return.

First name…….. Mary
last name………Carter
address……..Calle Atocha 45
city…………. Madrid
country……… Spain
zip code……..69150


Send the money to my name i give to you through western union today are get back to me with the full details.

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Best of Blog: Well-Fed Ex-Geese

With elbows resting on a rustic windowsill on a farm in France’s Dordogne, I lost track of time watching Denis grab an endless line of geese one at a time in a kind of peaceful, mesmerizing trance, filling them with corn. Like his father and his father and his father, Denis spends five hours a day, every day, all year long sitting in a barn on a rolling stool with a machine that looks like a giant vacuum cleaner filled with corn, surrounded by geese.

He rhythmically grabs a goose by the neck, pulls him under his leg and stretches him up, sliding the tube down to the belly and fills it with corn. He pulls the trigger to squirt the corn, slowly slides the tube up the neck and out, holds the beak shut for a few seconds, lets that goose go and grabs the next.

When I told friends we planned to film geese being force-fed — the traditional way they fatten the livers to make foie gras, the prized delicacy in France’s Dordogne region — many expressed disgust and even thought I was wrong to show it on TV. There are actually people who want to boycott French foie gras for what they consider inhumane treatment of the geese. That’s why I was on Denis’ goose farm…to learn more about le gavage (as the force-feeding process is called).

Elevage du Bouyssou, a big, homey goose farm a short drive from Sarlat, is run by a Denis and Nathalie Mazet. The geese are filled with corn three times a day for the last month of their lives. They have expandable livers and no gag reflex, so the corn stays there, gradually settling as it’s digested, making room for the next visit from Denis and his corn gun.

Watching Denis work, I wondered what a life like that would be…actually knowing an endless cycle of all those geese. Did geese populate his dreams? How did it affect his relations with his wife?

While Denis squirts corn, Nathalie meets tourists — mostly French families — who show up each evening at six to see how their beloved foie gras is made. The groups stroll the idyllic farm as Nathalie explains how they raise a thousand geese a year. She stresses that the key to top-quality foie gras is happy geese raised on quality food in an unstressed environment. They need quality corn and the same feeder.

I join the group as we un-force-feed the baby geese. We stroll into the grassy back lot where the older geese run free — backlit by the low, early-evening sun, they look like a Muesli commercial (perfectly fulfilling my goose dream for the TV show).

Two geese are humping. I can’t help but notice the boy yanking feathers off the back of the girl’s head as he (I suppose) enjoys his orgasm. Nathalie said she can tell which girls are getting any action by the bald spots on the backs of their heads. There’s plenty of action, as about half the birds in the yard sported the souvenir — that fowl equivalent of wife-beating — that comes with a roll in the hay.

The Mazets sell everything but the head and feet. The down feathers only net about 30 cents a goose. The serious money is in the livers. A normal liver weighs a quarter-pound. When done with the force-feeding process, the liver weighs about two pounds. (With a thousand geese, they produce a ton of foie gras annually. Nathalie said, “Barely enough to support one family.”)

These geese actually have a special shape — like they’re waddling around with a full diaper under their feathers. Just the sight of this shape — which is a sales icon in shops throughout the Dordogne — is enough to make visiting English travelers (who come here in droves for the foie gras) salivate.

Why the Dordogne? It’s on the geese migratory path. Ages ago, locals here caught geese on their migration, livers enlarged for the long journey (like traveling with a topped-off gas tank). As French are inclined to do, they ate the innards, found them extra-tasty and decided to produce their own. Those first French foie gras farmers didn’t know it, but the technique of keeping geese and enlarging the livers for human consumption goes back to ancient Egyptian times.

Nathalie, like other French enthusiasts of le gavage, says that while their animals are calm, in no pain and are designed to take in food this manner, American farm animals are typically kept in little boxes and fed chemicals and hormones to get fat. Most battery chickens in the US live less than two months and are plumped with hormones. Her geese are free-range and live six months.

Dordogne geese live lives at least as comfy as other farm animals (that people so upset with the foie gras process have no problem eating) and are slaughtered as humanely as any non-human can expect in this food-chain existence.

Some people raise geese as a hobby. On a different farm I met Cyril, a retired Parisian realtor. His dream: To live his golden years in the Dordogne region with a little barn full of geese to force-feed. He claims to “speak goose” and will feed his geese any time…just drop by, so I added him to our guidebook.

After a few days in the Dordogne, where farmers in the markets are evangelical about their foie gras and constantly passing out little goose-liver sandwiches — and where every meal seems to start with a foie-gras course — I always leave with strong need for foie gras detox.