Rare Earth

A short video while I fix up the full-series four hour extravaganza. It needed a few changes that our wonderful viewers helped me with along the way. For now, however, a quick grudge. As always, love you guys for watching and thanks for breaking the Youtube algorithmic suppression by showing up regardless.

I'd call this video a palate cleanser after the Lebanon series, but perhaps that would be a little gross.

Continuing along on my flippant and unfortunately short Austria series we have a video about a country that I suppose both is and is not Austria. It has a great name though, so obviously 1 had to make a video about it. That said it also had a lot of barbed wire and nobody to check our passports, so unfortunately we were forced to take our video from outside their borders. Granted I'm not sure it would have changed much if we'd been able to get in. This is the Kugelmugel, Austria's anarchist micronation.

This week's video is about the Mayerling Affair, a story from an infamous hunting lodge in the Austrian countryside. It is a story about the first world war that I'd never heard before visiting and thus felt like it was worth passing on. Sorry, Austria. I realize I'm not exactly doing your country justice with this short series. But I think we can agree 1 am not be the first person to drag your national name through the mud.

When I started researching this episode I had little to no knowledge about the history of Esperanto. I imagined it was just a kooky language for people who liked being extra. So I'm really happy that my wife and I ended up wandering around that Viennese museum last year because the inspiration it gave me to learn all this stuff has really helped frame how the world operates in my head. If you're in Vienna, I suggest you do the same.

The first video from our season in Peru. I'm going to try to go step by step through history but I don't think I'm going to write these as a combined episode like I'd done for Lebanon. That took way too long and the stories here are more disjointed. But I suppose we'll see where I end up with all that as it happens. Enjoy!