YouSaid · the spoken record

Rick Steves

lines on the record: 113
first: 2021-03-08
most recent: 2021-03-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And then I saw these kids with backpacks with the European equivalent of a URL pass, an interrail pass. And they were free as the wind. And they had no parents in sight. And I remember looking at the destination board. In that old fashioned Copenhagen train station, which to me is sort of almost a mecca of travelers to go into these old train stations.”
2021-03-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rick Steves' Europe: Rick Steves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The second trip, yeah, two years later, and I was 16, so I don't know, that would have been 10th, 11th grade or something. I remember I was in the train station with my parents and I saw these kids. This was really a Eureka moment for me because I was literally, legally chained to my mom to travel with her pest book.”
2021-03-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rick Steves' Europe: Rick Steves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And I remember on the next trip to Europe, I was in the train station in Copenhagen, going between the piano factories in Germany and the relatives in Norway. And I saw these backpackers. And this was back in a time when literally a 16-year-old kid in the United States could be on his mother's passport. I didn't have a passport. My mom had a passport with two photographs on it. It was her and her son.”
2021-03-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rick Steves' Europe: Rick Steves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was probably one of the eye-opening things that I thought this world is just inviting me to open up to it and explore. And I remember this old guy, he looked like a caricature out of some silent movie. He had a big handlebar mustache and a fancy carved pipe, and he was telling stories about how he witnessed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 that kicked off World War I. And he was old enough to have witnessed it. And I was just wide eyed. And I was right on the border of the communist world, right there between Austria and Hungary. And oh, gee, it was a cauldron. It was a whirlpool of culture and history. And had my parents not taken me to Europe, I just would not have had that dimension to my world.”
2021-03-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rick Steves' Europe: Rick Steves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Summer of 69. Are we looking out a window? I think that's, yeah, that's my mom and my dad and a piano salesman who took care of us from Bersendorfer in Vienna. And an old man we met. And it was Sunday and we went to this little village and we dropped in on the church. And after the mass, everybody, it just felt like it was an old Wild West scene. Everybody was wearing black and top hats and long mustaches and everybody walked across the dusty square, past the fountain, over to the wine garden. And they would drink their wine and they would smear lard on rustic bread and tell stories. And it was multi-generational. And to me,”
2021-03-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rick Steves' Europe: Rick Steves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Three cents apiece in the coin markets. If it was a German coin owner, a Norwegian coin. So I could buy 52 grocen coins for a nickel and bring them home and sell them for three cents each.”
2021-03-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rick Steves' Europe: Rick Steves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, and I just thought, okay, I'm going to make the best of this. And then I was always into stuff. I remember I had no money at all, but I was collecting things. I would collect bottle caps because in Europe, when you have a bottle cap, it says what city it was bottled in. So I'd have all these exotic bottle caps, beer or soft drinks with where it was bottled. And I collected that. I collected matchbooks. I collected sugar cubes. I also was a businessman. Guy, it's kind of, when I think back on it, funny, because I found the most incredible business for a 14-year-old because I was a coin collector. Coins sold in Seattle in the 60s, foreign coins for”
2021-03-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rick Steves' Europe: Rick Steves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At first, I didn't want to go. I was a 14 year old with a bad attitude. Then I got over there, and I've always navigated. I navigated childhood with a pragmatic understanding that things go better if you're not fighting your parents.”
2021-03-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rick Steves' Europe: Rick Steves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, my very first moments over there, I remember just stepping out of the hotel on my very first morning in the Netherlands, and there was a stop sign in front of this little town in the Netherlands and all the people had bicycles with racks on the front of the bicycles and in every rack. There was a set of wooden shoes. And they're all pedaling out to the farm where they were going to work in the farm with their wooden shoes for a practical purpose, not for tourism, but because you needed wooden shoes to walk around in the soggy bog.”
2021-03-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rick Steves' Europe: Rick Steves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I had to. I mean, that wasn't an option. It's interesting. My dad made me play the piano. My mom wasn't musical. You know, so that was a big part of my childhood. And I remember one day I came home from school and my dad said, son, we're going to Europe to see the piano factories. And I thought, dad, that's a silly idea. But it was actually what opened up my world.”
2021-03-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rick Steves' Europe: Rick Steves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, my dad was a piano tuner. He was the go-to guy in Seattle for concert pianists and so on, and an old German guy said, Steve, you should import the finest pianos in the world from Germany. So my dad thought, well, that's interesting. And he went to the piano fair in Frankfurt and made connections with the great piano makers. And he decided to import pianos. And I remember when I was a kid, I was just what we were all excited about. I couldn't step into a home without lifting up the fall board and seeing what the name was above the keyboard for that piano. And, you know, I knew the Beatles paid a blutner and each piano has a different personality. Even to this day, you know, I can't go into a building in Europe when I'm traveling, if I see a piano without checking out the name of it, or I squint to see, you know, at the TV special. What piano that person playing?”
2021-03-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rick Steves' Europe: Rick Steves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“we'd go to church not every Sunday and I do remember it was kind of embarrassing we'd go to church and then after communion we would we would go up there and have our the wine and the wafer and then we would as a family we would walk straight out of the church it's like thank you that was tasty and then we'd walk to the car and we'd go camping and it was like that was when I think back on it kind of a not a very polite way to go to church but you know my parents were juggling a lot of things and they they wanted to have their cake and had their communion and vacation too but yeah we grew up I mean, now I love the whole Lutheran style of Christianity. But back then it was just, you know, it's who your parents and your grandparents were. So, you know, we were Lutherans.”
2021-03-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rick Steves' Europe: Rick Steves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No strategy at all. I never really wanted to look in the book and say, oh, now you have a COO. Now you have a CFO. I don't even know what that stuff is until it becomes apparent, oh, we need a guy to do this. And then they go, yeah, that's called a CFO. We're just kind of going, oh, that's why they have that.”
2021-03-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Rick Steves' Europe: Rick Steves · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT