818 Amsterdam Museums; Regenerating London; European Borders

From the Dutch masters of the Golden Age to the curious collections of more recent times, there's a museum in Amsterdam to show you just about anything. And there's a museum dedicated to handbags and there's a museum dedicated to pipes. Coming up, Dutch guides get us primed for the variety of exhibits you'll find in Amsterdam. London's the kind of city that keeps reinvesting in itself by turning derelict industrial sites into places you'd love to visit. A statue at the St. Pankras train station symbolizes the city's vitality. It's an extraordinary example of how London is this place where people flood in, people flood out, and there's all these little stories and microcosms. And we'll take a closer look at how borders can define a country and where they don't, like in Belgium. It kind of doesn't fit into our modern conception of the nation-state. The idea that everyone should share a language and a culture. It's all just ahead. Travel with Rick Steves. Come along. Every national border can tell a surprising story about the world. That's how John Elage sees it. He's back with us today on Travel with Rick Steves to look at how Europe's borderlines reflect centuries of complicated history that define the world as we know it today. London has been a city for just about 2,000 years now. We'll hear how rejuvenating derelict and dodgy sites is an ongoing process all across the city. The result is often a spiffy new attraction to complement London's timeless landmarks. Let's start the hour looking at the variety of museums, both classic and unconventional, that the city of Amsterdam has to offer for our amusement. Part of the charm of Amsterdam is its willingness to be world-class, irreverent and quirky all at the same time. And nowhere is this more evident than in the city's impressive variety of museums. It seems that in Amsterdam there's a museum for just about every possible interest and curiosity. Art enthusiasts revel in powerhouses like the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum, while the Anne Frank House and the Dutch Resistance Museum provide poignant history lessons. The Houseboat Museum and Rembrandt's House are quintessential Amsterdam experiences, and if you're into fluorescent art, cats, funerals, bibles, microbes, marijuana, tattoos, or hidden churches and attics, Amsterdam's got you covered. I'm joined today by two Dutch guides, Jody van Engelstorp and Ellen Janssen, to help sort through our choices of museums from the highbrow to the weird and wacky. Jody and Ellen, thanks for being here. Thank you for having us. Great to be here. I had fun putting that array of Dutch museums together because there's so much in your beautiful city of Amsterdam. Yeah. Let's start with the what's called Museum Square, right? Yes. What do we find there, Jody? On that square you find all the big ones. So you find the Rijksmuseum, which is Rijksmeans Empire. So it's a royal museum basically with all the big masters, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Franz Halls. But way more. You can spend a full day in there. And it's a purpose-built museum, isn't it? It was built to house the art, which is beautiful. There's something about that that I really like, and it's just so well displayed. And you just said the three big names again. I love it when just here a Dutch person says it. Rembrandt, Vermeer, Franz Halls. Oh, you see, that little tiny country has three of the greatest artists ever, and there's lots, lots more. What else will you find on museums? I find the Van Gogh Museum, or Van Gogh, but really Van Gogh. And that is also amazing, of course. They have this wonderful audio tour, but for the Van Gogh you really have to make a reservation. Make a reservation. And then it's beautifully displayed, I find, in chronological order. So you can just go to Van Gogh's life in his art. It's just gorgeous. And Ellen, there's a modern art museum to cap it from there. What would that be? It's a pretty museum of modern art. If you're into modern art, it is must see, because it has top works there. And it's been called, by the locals, it's been called the bathtub, because it has this shape. But it's really modern and vibrant, and you need to be into modern art. I find because it's the Stadelic, is that what it's called? The Stadelic, which means of the city. The city. Oh, okay. And yeah, it's a great museum, but if you don't like modern art, you're not going to like it. Everybody likes Van Gogh. And do recognize the crowds that Jodi mentioned for the Van Gogh. Now, when we look at history, of course, the Netherlands is all about Henry Hudson in Dutch East, India Company, and exploring the world, and so on. Where would we learn a lot about that, Ellen? Yes, in the maritime museum, I would say, because it's all about the ships and the connection of the Dutch with the world, and how that all came about. There's also an old replica of an Eastern Eman ship that you can go on, and they will tell you what stocks they would trade, and how the ships would sail, filled with herring to go to Scandinavia, and come back with wood and salt, and everything was traded in those days via ships. I've been there many times. It's never crowded, and it's just a short walk down the harbour from the train station. It's really an underappreciated museum, and if you're curious about the foundations of Dutch greatness, a lot of us don't realize that trade was vital, and it was mostly done by sea, and the Dutch really ruled the raves, so Dutch became a mighty little country, punching way above its weight in many respects. Now, Jodi, with all that trade, there was a lot of money, and you have a lot of canal houses that are just super elegant from a few centuries ago. Thankfully, a few of them survive, and they're open for tourism. What would you recommend there? You can go to the Willetsholzhausen Museum, which explains you all about the canal houses, and how it's built, and you can walk through one, see how it really was like. And how people lived then, who had endless money. Exactly, yes. Have you been to that one, Ellen? Yes, and there's another one too, Van Loon, family Van Loon, who was a wealthy trading family, and they're both exactly as they used to be in the 1600s from a wealthy family. It's so great they've saved that, and it's just a short walk from whatever you're doing in Amsterdam. One thing I find fun about Amsterdam is just the quirky museums. Do you have that word in Dutch, quirky? Quirky. Heck. Heck, yeah. Heck museums. What's a heck museum, Ellen? Oh, there were loads. I mean, you would dress them like that. There's the Houseboat Museum. So that's going into somebody's houseboat on the canal, which is amazing. Yes, yes, yes. And there's a museum dedicated to handbags, and there's a museum dedicated to pipes, and there's loads of them. I went into the pipe museum just for kicks, and it was great, and the guy there was so evangelical about pipes. Old pipes, new pipes, big pipes, little pipes, and so on. I've got kind of a quirky friend that runs the, what's it called, Electric Ladyland Museum, and he's into phosphorescence. Yeah, right. Stuff that glows in the dark, and you can go to that museum, and it's just his basement, basically, and it's a lifelong collection of phosphorous, and he'll turn off the lights, and he'll show you the phosphorous in his own tattoo, and you get to know this old hippie. But that's the kind of quirky people that have their museums. You know what I like to do is go online to TripAdvisor and type in Amsterdam, and I don't really care about where to sleep and where to eat, but things to do. And then I don't care what's in the top 10 or the top 20, I just want to know what are the things to do, and you scroll down and you'll find, oh, there's a Bible museum, or there's a tattoo museum, or there's a houseboat museum. And what they also did when they constructed the Metro Line, North-South, the new one, they had a very big investment of art as well, so if you can just have a ticket and go into the Metro, and every station will have a beautiful work of modern... Modern art installation, like for instance at a Rokin station, they have made a beautiful display of all the archaeological objects that they found while they were digging the station. Nice, nice. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're talking museums in Amsterdam with Ellen Janzig and Jody van Engelstorp, and we're talking about these quirky museums, but I do want to warn our listeners that there are a lot of commercial gimmicks, and people are just trying to make money off of not very savvy tourists. You'll see them for sale on the dam rack, on the main drag, and they're all discounted today, and people will spend important time and money seeing kind of silly things. There's the ice bar, there's the torture dungeon. Can you think of any other gimmicks that are not really historic? Madame De Sao, the last museum. The Sex Museum. There's two Sex Museums. The Marijuana Museum. Tulip Museum. Tulip Museum is actually a shop. It's actually a shop. The Heineken beer experience. Yes, the Bowls experience. The witch? Oh, the Bowls experience, yeah. Bowls experience, that's about the local gin. Gin. It's nice if you're really into gin. Actually, if you've got an interest in those, I think I would say the Gin Museum and the Marijuana Museum are actually serious museums to me. I'll stick up to them as quite a cultural phenomenon, I would say. But other ones, there's nothing historic there, and they're just highly advertised, and people are getting kit quacks to take you there. So be careful of that. But I do want to talk about what's coming up, because there's a buzz that there's going to be a new slavery museum. What do you know about that? The National Museum of Slavery, and it's now being developed. It will open in a couple of years, because that is now a hot topic in the Netherlands, how we deal with our historic past and the slave trade that we were involved in. And there have been a couple of breakthrough moments, so the Dutch government was the first government to officially apologize for their role in the slave trade. The King has even asked for mercy for their role. So these events have triggered a lot of things in the Netherlands, and so there's much more consciousness now about our past. I think this is a great trend in museums, everywhere that I go in Europe and all over the globe, I would imagine. And a lot of Americans don't realize that the slave trade was a triangular slave trade, wasn't it? Can you explain to us just very simple terms, the triangular slave trade of which the Netherlands profited from? Well, they never sailed an empty ship, so they had to take stock, and then they sailed to the coast of Africa, and they unloaded that stock, and then they took in the next stock, which were humans meant for slave trade. So then they went to the West Indies, and then they unloaded that stock, and then they exchanged that for sugar, and then they came back to Amsterdam. And sold it there? And sold it there. And in every leg of that triangular voyage, they would make money. And that's something that needs to be reckoned with, and that will be dealt with very thoughtfully in this upcoming Museum of Slavery. So it's good that countries are owning up to their dark colonial pasts, and you'll see that all over Europe these days. And with another slice of dark history, we've got the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam. Have you been to that yet, Helen? Yes, I have. Tell us about that. Soon as it opened. When you come in, you see a big picture of a little boy who is photographed when the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated, so by the liberators, and this little boy was a boy from Amsterdam, he's seven years old, and he walks past bodies. So this is a very harrowing thing that you see when you come in, but then later in the Museum, you're not inundated with these kind of shocking images. It sets the tone, no. But it focuses on normal people, people like we are, and then the context of them going to concentration camps and of the Shoah. So when you say Shoah, that's the Hebrew word for the Holocaust, the persecution of the Jews. Yes, yes. And so there are artifacts, there are stories to put it into perspective. Also, the gradual taking away of rights, so how it all evolved, so what they started in 1939 and 1940, and you see all these little things that were done building up to this eventual just industrialized machine. So this is an important stop, especially if you're concerned about honoring the victims of the Holocaust that we learned from this and don't let it ever happen again. It gives you a very good idea of what the consequences were. There's so much to see and learn from in Amsterdam. And as we're talking about this, I'm thinking about great museums and great galleries and great sightseeing experiences outside of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. It's just really important for people to know what is available when they're going to travel all the way across the Atlantic to see the Netherlands. Ellen Janzig, Joriden Engelsen, Dankuvel for helping us better understand the historic and cultural charms of your beautiful country. Amsterdam. I was 15 years ago and I was excited to update it. But the basic sights are remarkably stable and unchanged. I needed some big news. And the big news is a glittering skyline of skyscrapers and lots of regeneration projects. Regeneration. It's a word I kept hearing. And while scouting before writing up the script, I followed local advice on visiting former industrial sites that had become run down and then abandoned and then with lots of money and vision. They were turned into thriving quarters mixing business and residential with great infrastructure and green spaces. In other words, regeneration. For me, that's the big news for the visitor in London. And to learn more, I'm joined by a local blue badge guide who joined our crew for the shoot, Catherine Alcock. Katie, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. So as I was doing that introduction, did you understand my frustration kind of I was trying to make London new, but Churchill War Rooms, the Tower of London, Big Ben, changing of the guard, it's remarkably stable, isn't it? It is. It is. For a city that's 2000 years old, you know, there are going to be parts which have been the same for 2000 years or 1000 years or... So 20 years is not much in the 2000 year history. That's a good way to look at it. Not at all. Yeah, not at all. A blink of an eye. But like you say, under the surface, there are some major changes. So regeneration, how do you define regeneration? Well, I think that with a city like London that has had to evolve to stay successful over time, you end up inevitably with these spaces which no longer serve communities or no longer serve a purpose as we move out of being an industrial city, a city where manufacturing is happening, a city where docks are and, you know, sort of ships and things are coming in. You're left with these spaces in the public fabric and regeneration is about bringing those spaces back to life and making them relevant again. Well, there's a perfect example. You said docks and there's a place just downstream from London called the Docklands. And I understand in the 1800s that was the busiest, most impressive port in the entire world because, of course, the British Empire was the empire upon which the sun never set in a rule recorder of the planet. Well, in modern times, container shipping means container ships can't even get up the river that far and you need a much bigger facility. It's moved downstream further, like all over Europe, all over the world. Container shipping moves away from the port, has to relocate, and you abandon the docklands and then it becomes a dangerous run-down zone and then somebody gets the great idea to fix it up. And tell me about the docklands today. Yes. So today, this area, as you say, which was once filled with cranes and machinery and sort of in some cases almost stagnant bodies of water, has now become a sort of a place where business happens. So the docklands, the area around Canary Wharf and places like that, is filled with office space now. You've got major, it's almost a new financial centre. You've got major banks there. You've got news organisations like Reuters. You've got a large amount of residential property there now because the people who work in these places want to live nearby. So there's apartments going up all over the place. Beautiful open spaces, public parks, greenery. And it's taken an area that really, you wouldn't dream of heading down there sort of 40 years ago. Now is an area where it's actually quite nice to spend a day in Canary Wharf even though it's very much still a sort of a business-y residential area. It's beautiful to wander around and enjoy. You know, a big destination for me, I was excited about, for both the guidebook and the TV show, was the King's Cross Development. I love taking a kind of a rundown neighbourhood and a depressing kind of train station district and investing in it and turning it into something that just sparkles. Tell us about the renovation of that great station, St. Pancras. So St. Pancras sort of sits alongside King's Cross, right in front of this area which is known sort of collectively as Coal Drops Yard, although there's areas like Granary Square and things like that within it. And these two big stations, of course, had a lot of industrial heritage that came with them and in fact the Regent's Canal flows behind both stations as well. So at one point in time this was an area where you had a lot of coal coming in. Of course initially these trains were steam trains, so a lot of coal had to be brought into London. It was sort of purely... Okay, so you're my blue badge guide, so I want you to give me that context that so many of us Americans don't have that historic background. Tell us about the importance of industrial revolution and how canals mattered to that. And then what happened to the canals when the train lines came? Well canals originally were the most efficient, easiest, quickest way of moving goods around the country. And this involved a lot of boats but also a lot of horses. You don't immediately put horses and canals together, but a lot of canal boats were drawn, were horse drawn, so horses would drag them along the river under bridges and so on and so forth. This was the main way of shipping industrial goods around the country until the advent of the railway system. So there's like a one-generation window where canal traffic was cutting edge. Yes. But then unfortunately if you just dug a long canal which cost a lot of money, people would rather just hop on the rails and take their coal and their goods into town. Right, although in London it still remained relevant for a while because these big trains would bring in, so what you get at Coal Drops Yard is a situation where trains are bringing in coal from York, from the north of England, to London to be used in the sort of the factories and the homes because of course people were burning coal to heat their homes as well. And it was then the canal that would take this, it would disperse it out among the city a little bit more and of course later on the tube and things like that. So what you get at Coal Drops Yard is this amazing place where you've got the trains coming in from the rest of the country, you've got the canals connecting parts of London and you've got all this stabling for horses that are then taking cartloads out around the city. And just a generation ago this was a wasteland, it was just covered with broken glass and prostitutes and drug addicts. It was a scary place to go. Yeah, it was the sort of place your parents warned you, you know, don't hang around King's Cross when you go into London because it had quite a reputation. There's not a hint of that anymore. Not at all. No, it's a very sort of family friendly shopping and dining area now and they have wonderful projects. I mean there's sort of little mini outdoor cinema which goes on there in the summer and they play sort of classic movies when you have sporting events like Wimbledon and things like that, sometimes there's a big screen showing the tennis. Oh, it's lovely. Just on a summer lunchtime, you see all the 9-5 work crowd there having in the little park that's on the canal. One of the towpaths that used to be trod by horses and even prisoners and stuff. I mean I always think, yo, ho, he, ho, the Volga boat song. That's a song you sing when you're pulling a barge up a canal or up a river. And these canals now are green belts and the towpaths are bike paths. And you know, so many cities have a beloved former train line that's now like a bike path. And all over England you can find these former industrial age canals that are green belts and with lovely walks. And this one comes right into the heart of London. You could bike into London or walk into London on that towpath, step across the street and hop onto the bullet train that gets you to Paris in two hours. Yeah, it's extraordinary isn't it? It's amazing. Hey, this is Travel with Rick Steves and we're getting up to date with regeneration projects in London to date. Our guest is London Blue Badge guide, Catherine Alcock. And she's a writer and a guide who lives and works in London. Her website is CatherineAlcock.com. Hey Catherine, that last spot we were talking about is Coldrop's Yard in Granary Square. Now if you wanted to just go on the other side of the Thames River, there's a former power station called the Battersea Power Station. And everybody in London when I said, what's a good visual example of regeneration? That's what everybody told me. I was scouting for the TV show and they said, oh Battersea Power Station, tell us about that. Yeah, Battersea Power Station has been for a long time one of the most sort of iconic buildings in London really. And you know, we hate to use the word iconic, but it is iconic. It was an enormous power station, originally half the size it is now and then it was extended later, providing large parts of London with all its energy. And when it was decommissioned in the 1970s, it became a sort of an example of London's fading industrial age, I suppose, that it was this sort of large hulking shell on the Thames that was empty and run down and falling apart. It appeared quite iconically on the cover of Pink Floyd's Animals album with a flying pig floating over the top of it, which really sort of cemented it in people's consciousness. And for a long time it was this empty hulk, you know, a husk really of its former self. And the regeneration that has happened there and the area is still being regenerated now. It's sort of in process almost, but the main part, which was this power station has been completed and it's extraordinary in the way it's transformed the area. So, and it actually provided one-fifth of London's energy for generations, huh? Well, yes, but for decades, certainly. And it was a place that was symbolic of that energy-guzzling nature of the capital. Right. Billowing smoke, billowing out of these hundred-yard tall chimneys as a sign of progress and prosperity, but then as a sign of lung disease and pollution, and then just vacated. And today it's a modern shopping mall surrounded by glitzy, wonderful, enticing places to live if you want to have that big city condominium lifestyle with a landscaped garden going right down to the river. And there's new commuter boats going from that pier that used to accept all the coal coming in and going out that zip you around by commuter boats, not tourist boats, but commuter boats now that take you quickly on the river from one point to the other. This is Travel with Rick Steves. We're talking with Katie Alcock. Her website is katharinealkock.com. She's a blue badge guide in London. We're talking about how London has been given a new face, a new energy through regeneration projects and a totally transformed cityscape. Katie, when I was assessing the B-roll that the images we had from 15 years ago, a lot of it, it works today. I mean, there's Big Ben, you know, and here's the House of Parliament. But anything that's wide that shows the cityscape, you cannot use unless it's in the last couple of years because there's always new skyscrapers. And what's really interesting to me is how the city has been reshaped with this new skyline and at the base of this forest of skyscrapers, you've got a lovely 19th century or earlier, I suppose, market hall, the Leiden Hall Market. And it's so interesting for me to think from that little humble basis, which was a big deal in its day, you've got these towering skyscrapers. Before we get into the skyscrapers, tell us about Leiden Hall Market, because that's a beautiful site that a lot of people miss when they're in the City of London. It's a beautiful spot and I mean, if you want to see some really beautiful Victorian 19th century sort of raw ironwork and decoration, it's a really beautiful place to go, very colourful. Beautiful sort of canopies, all the shops that are in there have to have limited brand visibility, I suppose, on their shop fronts to keep. So, no McDonald's, Golden Arches. Exactly, exactly. You can have your brand name, but it has to be in the sort of approved letterhead and all that sort of thing, approved font and all that sort of thing. Okay, I didn't realise that, but that's my impression, is it's like a little time warp. And when you step out of that market thinking there's been business there for 2,000 years, your eye goes right up, your eyes arc up because you're in a forest of skyscrapers and what I love is there's some sort of a competitive spirit or a creative spirit where every skyscraper has its own personality. I love the architecture of the skyscrapers in London. Can you talk a little bit about that because that's not just accidental? It's not, no. And I think one of the challenges you have with skyscrapers and I think any city that's building big buildings is, you know, how do we keep a sense of personality? How do we keep a sense that this is London and not any other skyscraper filled city in the world? And how we've tried to manage that, I suppose, in London, I think, is by, A, going for sort of excellent design and B, you know, sort of creating our own sort of mythology or language about these places. We love to give our skyscrapers nicknames, usually based on what we think they look like, what they remind us of. So let's talk about that because we were on every skyscraper, by the way, to get the permission to build. It's going to rob the line of sight from other people, so it has to provide something. This is my understanding. And it provides a platform like a public garden, halfway up or on the very top, that is accessible to the public. A garden in the sky, it might be called, where you can enjoy looking out and being welcome to enjoy that, whether you're a business person or a backpacker or whatever. And when you stand on the, we stand at on Fin Church 20, was that the... The garden at 120, yeah. The garden at 120. And this is, for me, the easy access, because some of these have to take reservations and so on, but the garden at 120, it just goes up 40 stories or something like that, instead of the very tippy top of the skyscraper, but you get a view there. And if you know where to look, you can see these skyscrapers that have nicknames. Give us a tour of the funny, odd, designed, creative, delightful skyscrapers that have earned a nickname. What might we see and why? Well, one of the first, if not the first to be built in the city, was one that's... It's a bullet-shaped building. I suppose it's like a bullet from a gun, a bullet-shaped building. But we call it the gherkin, which is the English word for pickle, because we think it reminds us of a pickle. It looks like a pickle. I like it as a pickle, not a bullet. It does look like a bullet, but it also looks like this giant pickle. Yes. And a lot of Americans don't know that. I think in England, you say gherkin. So there's the pickle. Okay, what's another one? There it is. We've also got the walkie-talkie building, which we think looks like a great big walkie-talkie, big telephone sitting over the city skyline. It does. It has the earpiece that sort of arcs in. That's with the big, massive garden in the sky. And you got to buy a drink to go up there after hours, but it's worth it. And it's just an amazing place from the very top of that, the walkie-talkie. What's another nickname? We have the scalpel building, which we think looks like a sort of almost like a surgeon's scalpel. It's got a very sharp point to it. And we have the shard, which is the tallest building in the country and looks like a big shard of broken glass. It does, yeah. And there's the inside-outside building. Oh, yes. Yes. Which is the guts are on the outside. It's kind of like the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Same architect. And you got the grater. What is the grater or something? Oh, the cheese grater. Yes, the cheese grater building, which it has this extraordinary angle. So sort of one side of it is vertical and then the other side is a sloped angle. And we think it looks like our cheese graters that we've sort of rub our cheddar against to season our meals. Catherine Alcox, our guide right now on Travothric Steves to the places that keep London hopping as one of the world's most dynamic cities. Catherine works as a private guide and leads themed walking tours around the city. She was named London's Blue Badge Guide of the Year for 2020. Catherine's also one of the city's infamous Lou ladies, leading tours that show the city's history of toilets and sanitation, which start appropriately enough just outside the toilets at Waterloo Station. Her website is CatherineAlcox.com. Katie, I could talk all day with you about London. It's so much fun to have a local guide to be able to bring some background and some meaning into our sightseeing. Can you just wrap up this little conversation with a moment that as a tour guide, you particularly enjoy sharing with your travellers to appreciate the London of today? Where would you take me and what would we do or see? To show people the London of today, I would take them to Coldrop's Yard, I think, because you have such an extraordinary variety of architecture there and spaces and different examples of how they've been repurposed and evolved, whether it's apartments built within gas holders, whether it's sort of coal yards developed into shops. And it sits right alongside some new developments, but also some beautiful old features like St. Pancras Old Church. And you'd step into the St. Pancras train station and at the end of the line, there's this towering statue called the Lover's, right? That's right, yeah. And what would you see? Because that statue to me really speaks volumes about what this is all about. It really does, yeah. It's a statue which shows two lovers, maybe meeting, maybe saying goodbye, we're not sure. And the plinth of that statue is covered in smaller images of hellos and goodbyes, I suppose, all of which have taken place in this station over the past 200 years or so. It's an extraordinary example of how London is this place where people flood in, people flood out. And there's all these little stories and microcosms and things happening. It's an exquisite example. Catherine Alcock, thank you so much and best wishes with your guiding in London. Thank you. Oh London is a native place, a great and gallant city, for all the streets are paved with gold and all the folks are witty. And there's an awesome lady's fine that ride in coach and seeks, but nothing drink but climate wine and talk of politics. What's behind all the borderlines you see on a map? Are they designed to divide us or maybe unite people behind a common line? Well John Elage explores the surprising stories beneath the surface that have brought us the nations of Europe that we know today. He's back with us next on Travel with Rick Steves. Ever since I was a kid, I've gazed up my map of Europe as if a menu for great travels. And that map can tell stories, countries in the European Union, countries covered by the Urail Pass, solid colors on the map masking lots of strife within like Yugoslavia, strange little countries. Why is there San Marino, Liechtenstein, and what's with Andorra? Ha, Poland's here one century, it's gone the next, and then it's back again. And religious squabbles. There's most of Ireland and then there's that Protestant bit up in the north. Journalist John Elage has been exploring the complicated way borders have been shaping human history for as long as we've been around to draw them. He's written a fun to read book called A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders and it's designed to tell us the stories behind some of the world's best known borders and some of its most controversial ones. He joins us now on Travel with Rick Steves to uncover how these generally man-made and invisible lines have influenced our history and how they shape our world today. John, thanks for joining us. Thank you for having me, good to see you again. Yeah, now your book talks about borders all over the world. I like to focus in on Europe and you've got 47 chapters in your book. They're just a delight to read and one of them is called Why is Europe Not a Peninsula in Asia? And looking at the map, it's a fair question. Why do we have Europe? It just seems like it's a big western chunk of a big land mass called Asia. Yeah, it does, doesn't it? I mean continents are all to some extent kind of socially constructed. They're made up, but Europe is more made up than the others. Normally you get at least kind of a narrow isthmus between say, North and South America. You can see North and South America are two separate land masses with a very narrow bit in between them. So it's reasonable to think of them as two separate things. There is no division between Europe and Asia. Europe and Asia are clearly very much the same thing. So I found it an interesting question to kind of delve into why we consider Europe to be a continent when we don't consider say Arabia to be a continent or India. And it seems to be a couple of different things. One of which is it dates back to the ancient Greek geographic conception of the world. Where if you were an ancient Greek sailor mucking around in the Aegean, then as far as you were concerned there were three land masses around you and it made sense to think of them separately as Africa, Asia and Europe. But then that kind of gets locked in by essentially the Islamic conquests of the 7th century and the sense that there is a thing called Christendom in the European land mass which is somehow different from the strange oriental worlds to the East. So that kind of creates a sense of difference in the 7th century and then when you get to 1500 and European imperialism, then Europeans get to impose their view of the world on everybody else and that's the world we still live in today. So basically everyone considers Europe a separate continent from Asia even though if you look at a map of the world physically, they're very much the same thing. It's so fascinating how geographical and cultural things come together and contribute to this challenge that we have of how do you divide stuff up. I'll never forget standing on the top of the rockage of Bralter and looking out and knowing that this is the one place on the world where you can see two great seas and two continents coming together. At the same time, I was in Europe, I could see Africa. I had the Mediterranean on my left and the Atlantic on my right and I saw the chop in the water and all the feed for the fish that attracted the fishermen and then I thought of the problem Spain has with Muslims from Africa coming over that straight and complicating their world and I thought of the moors that swept through in the 700s and were pushed back in the 1400s. I thought of all of the tumult that happened right there because of that geographical kind of situation and I thought, hmm, borders, fascinating isn't it? How did you get into your fascination with borders? I'm going to give you a very boring honest answer which is I grew up very near London city limits and it was very important to me that I was inside them rather than outside in the county of Essex which is kind of our equivalent of New Jersey. So it's a much less glamorous answer than your tail of standing on the rock of Gibraltar but that probably is the root of my interest in arbitrary lines on maps. So you were on the London side of that border then? It was very important to my sense of self-identity as a nerdy bookish teenager that I was a Londoner, not from Essex. That goes back to the whole European thing. I think to the Romans the basic test was did you speak Latin or Greek and were you part of Roman civilization? And then you were part of the empire and if you spoke any other language you were a barbarian outside of that wall and to this day we see remnants of that Roman-barbarian border. I mean as far as the Roman border went to the north after that was the barbarian world and in the Middle Ages that basically defined the line between Roman Catholic and Protestant Europe and to this day we have that difference between north and south Europe going all the way back to barbarian and Roman Empire times. Yes, no, I mean there are some very ancient borders that do persist from that era. I mean like Hadrian's Wall between England and Scotland. It doesn't follow the actual border between England and Scotland but it did set two different identities in motion in the second century AD and that do persist to this day. The idea that most of the island of Great Britain is this thing we call England but there's a mountainous bit to the west we call Wales and there's another slightly mountainous bit to the north beyond Hadrian's Wall that has its own identity in large part because that was outside the Roman Empire. You know that was a rough and tumble land, the land that you call home. You have the Romans deciding okay we don't even want to mess with these people to the north but let that be Scotland, what a bunch of barbarians. We even have the proud people of Wales and the border today it really follows an old rampart doesn't it, Ulfas Dijk? Roughly, as so often happens with these things the earthwork is kind of notional, like it doesn't actually follow the border exactly but I think both the division and identity and the existence of Ulfas Dijk do kind of tell you something about a change in the landscape at that point in the island. Like generally speaking Wales is quite, I was going to say quite mountainous you guys have proper mountains in North America. We don't really have those in the island of Great Britain but England is generally lowland whereas Wales and Scotland are much more highland and that meant that it's unclear the extent to which these were the sort of Romano-British people who were pushed to the extremes of the island by the Anglo-Saxons when they arrived in the fifth and sixth century and the extent to which this is a made up story about a culture war and nonetheless the different types of landscape mean you end up with different peoples living on them that centuries later become different nations. John when you think about the maps of Europe I'm always thinking about Charlemagne and a lot of people say Europe was born in the year 843 with the Treaty of Verdun when Charlemagne's administration divided his empire for his three grandsons and when you look at the map today you can still see that kind of fault line in the way Europe's country stack up can't you? Going all the way back 1200 years to Charlemagne. Charlemagne is a slightly underrated figure in European history I think he's often he doesn't have the reputation he probably should have given that he did sort of... Oh underrated I think he's the one name you got to know in European history between the year 500 and 1000 Oh I would absolutely agree with you but I think he's not a name that's that familiar to people today but he did create this empire in the in the eighth century of the Frankish lands and it was divided between his grandchildren at the Treaty of Verdun as you mentioned the interesting thing about that division is you end up with a western bit based on Paris you end up with an eastern bit which is a bit more itinerant but that sort of over the course of history becomes the Holy Roman Empire and ultimately Germany and there's this bit in the middle that gets complicated that's sort of meant to be the richest bit, it's the most glamorous bit because it has the original imperial capital at Rome it has the modern imperial capital modern to Charlemagne at Arken but it's sort of you end up with this kind of no man's land that's not going to be either French or German but could plausibly be attached to either so a thousand years later you still have wars over that territory that becomes Belgium and the Netherlands and Luxembourg and Switzerland and Alsace-Lorraine which is obviously a name to conjure within European history and features innumerous wars in the 19th and 20th centuries That is so important I was just going to say let's review that Charlemagne, he was the one guy that had Europe together really in the early Middle Ages well he used to be called the Dark Ages and when he's gone it has to be divided among his three grandsons and you essentially have France, Germany and the problematic little countries that stretch all the way from the low countries, Belgium to Rome where the Pope was, you just mentioned it, Alsace-Lorraine, the wars and so on That was back when you had a thing called, before we really honored primogenitor and they would divide the land among the sons later on I guess they had to decide do you want to have all that chaos by dividing it among the sons or do you just want to give everything to the oldest son, right? Well if you're going to have a monarchy you do face the problem of succession if you go with, you can either divide it between your children as was the Frankish custom but then you kind of end up with the territory split up into multiple little bits and they can often go the war with each other or you can have primogenitor where you just give it to the oldest one and then you face the problem that sometimes the oldest son is going to be an idiot but there's really no good way of doing it there's a good reason that we stopped letting monarchs rule the world And you got that complicated by feudalism which is just another word for a fragmented society and Europe was a bunch of tiny little states and dukedoms and fiefdoms before we had these big centralized powers and of course now we've got the big countries but there's a few little remnants in Europe that really go back to feudalism aren't there John? There are so San Marino which is a tiny hilltop settlement in the north of Italy claims its origins to be in the early fourth century which I think would probably have come as a surprise to the emperor Diocletian who firmly considered it to be Roman territory but that somehow just didn't get incorporated into the nation of Italy There's a few of these, there's Lichtenstein which could have implausibly Austrian, it could have been German, it could have been Swiss it ends up as none of them There is Andorra which is a condominium which means it's two heads of state are the presidents of France and the Spanish bishop, the bishop of the Gaelle and somehow it retains its independence So these are remnants of feudalism a thousand years after the feudal Europe was starting to fall apart They remind us that there's a lot of inertia in these borders There's some borders that made sense a long time ago and today they're just there I know from my study of the European Union that the European Union really is not excited about borders drawn after treaties that ended wars because they often don't recognize the legitimacy of ethnic regions They just want to keep this power happy and that power properly punished So you have big treaties after Napoleon in 1815, after World War I in 1918 and of course with the fall of Hitler in 1945 and a lot of the lines that we live with today are dictated by that not what makes sense with the ethnic roots of these regions and the European Union which is a new construct is favoring the ethnic regions I mean I know that it's a big problem in Belgium because you've got a political border and it ignores the fact that you've got Walloons and Flemish, French speaking people and Flemish speaking people and think about Basque country There's millions of Basque people and they didn't get a country when they drew the lines Well Belgium is a complicated country to explain because it kind of doesn't fit into our modern conception of the nation state The idea that everyone should share a language and a culture but it's been explained to me that Belgium fundamentally is a king and a football team and the fact that the Fleming's and the Walloons hate the French and the Dutch more than they hate each other and it turns out that is enough to give you a functioning nation these days We project the idea of the nation state back much further into history than it's actually existed I think that's partly because it was spread around the world by the French and the English through the British Empire France and England coalesce as nation states relatively early, both were about a thousand years old but most of Europe didn't work like that so you do have a lot of these territories that could plausibly belong in multiple countries Actually I've written an extra chapter for the UK paperback of the book which is out later this year on the history of Poland and one of the things I learnt from writing that was that even families could be divided as to what their national identity was So the first president of the Second Polish Republic after World War One his brother signed the Lithuanian Independence Declaration They've grown up together in the same family, they spoke the same language but they consider themselves to have different nationalities It's that contingent This is Travel with Rick Steves, we've been talking with John Elich His book is A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders Hey John, just to wrap things up, I'm wondering how do you think the map of Europe will look different by the end of this century? Because it's a work in progress isn't it? It is, I mean the book Europe has brought us a frequently changing, I think the last change we had was when Montenegro split from Serbia I think I think I'm right in saying that Kosovo is still largely unrecognised I think probably the change I am most confident, well two things Firstly I think we are probably going to see some kind of settlement in the war in Ukraine sooner rather than later and I think the very eastern provinces of Ukraine known as the Dombas are probably going to be given to Russia possibly before the end of this year A rather longer term prediction, just to be clear by the way I don't support that, I just think it's an inevitable result of where things stand in Ukraine A rather longer term prediction, I do think it is very probable we will see a united island before the century is out Star Trek predicted it would happen in the year 2024, that's obviously passed now but if you look at the demographics of Northern Ireland which remains a part of the United Kingdom the Catholic population is growing much faster than the Protestant population and the various changes to the borders that have been made post Brexit not the physical changes to the borders but in terms of the way they operate with trade and so on will mean that there is a gravitational pull towards the Republic of Ireland and away from Great Britain so I think it is very possible that we see a united island in a decade or two but we shall see, European history has never been predictable, so who knows You heard it here, a united Ireland Great John, let's check back later and see how that goes John Elidge, thanks so much for joining us and best wishes with you are raising awareness of the fascinating importance of the lines that define the countries on this planet Thank you for having me John Elidge's book is called A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders and it's now out in paperback John also writes for citymetric.com and The New Statesman We have links to his work in this week's show notes at ricksteves.com.com.radio That's also where you can email us with comments and questions like a listener in Maine recently did Arnie emailed us from Portland, Maine and Arnie asks, when you arrive in a new country or destination what are your favorite ways to settle in so you can dive right into the culture? That's so important Arnie because I know when I come in I just like to take a moment to settle in I have this attitude, I mean it's so fundamental I want to become a temporary local, I always like to say like a cultural chameleon So I make a point, I make a little pact with myself I don't drink tea at home but I'm in England and a nice cup of tea after a day of sightseeing makes a lot of sense When I'm in Tuscany of course I'm going to drink red wine and when I'm in Scotland I'm going to have whiskey So have that become a temporary local standard, that's part of your attitude And when you're settling into a new culture, so many times when I'm talking to people The people who say yes to serendipity whenever possible, they're the ones that have the best experiences A lot of people make a point to say no to serendipity Everybody gets serendipity knocking on their doors, make sure you let it in And finally, you need to have an attitude about not avoiding culture shock Culture shock, it needs to be seen as a constructive thing, it's the growing pains of a broadening perspective So you know, if people are fiddling with the worry beads, you can fiddle with worry beads When people are playing backgammon, you can play backgammon I imagine if you're with a bunch of strangers in a Greek tavern, you got your worried beads You're sipping your oozzo and you know how to play backgammon You're going to have an experience far better than the person that didn't make a point to embrace the culture Thanks so much Arnie and those are some tips on settling into a new culture Affiliate relations are by Sheila Gershoff Our theme music was written and performed by Jerry Frank You can find links to our guests and search the show archives at ricksteves.com. We'll see you next week with more Travel with Rick Steves With our 100 well-traveled colleagues, we produce America's best-selling guidebook series And organize small group tours to take over 30,000 travelers every year to Europe If you're dreaming of a European adventure, whether on your own or with a tour We'd love to help you make it happen