Foreign radio ~

I grew up listening to radio. My grandmother gave me a white electric clock radio that was straight out of the 70s. It had the funny looking lines for numbers on the Art Deco clock that was tall and narrow with short hands.



I'm pretty sure it only did AM radio. And when I was seven years old I would sit in my bedroom and listen after school to Paul Harvey and Chicken Man and then play while they talked about the news and all the other stuff that the adults like to listen to.



I enjoyed hearing about the weather and I continued listening as I got older. As a teenager I listened to the pop music radio stations. I wasn't in the Future Farmers of America (FFA) and so I didn't listen to country music hardly at all.



I shied away from the heavy rock radio stations because that was supposedly satanic music that I didn't want to let in my head, even though I really enjoyed some of it. I didn't really listen to news radio. When I started driving, I got tired of commercials and so I enjoyed my cassette tapes a little bit more, but I still listened to a lot of radio.



When a good song would come on, I'd pump it up. When the news or commercials or weather forecast came on, I'd switch to a different station or turn it down. This continued on in college and as I started working.



I live in the metro Atlanta area and so traffic reporting became very important to me for a while. The route that I took from home to work and back was such that there usually wasn't any traffic and so I kind of started tuning out the traffic reporting unless I was going downtown or around on the perimeter and I avoided doing that because of the traffic.



I remember listening to Christian radio stations on AM when I was working in my 20s. I especially enjoyed Jay Vernon McGee and would listen to him whenever I could. I got into talk radio in my 40s.



I listened to some of the earlier talk radio people in the Atlanta area. Glenn Beck and his hesitation between words in odd places drove me crazy so I didn't listen to him very much. I enjoyed Neil Bortz but he was on in the mornings and so I usually only listened when I had an evening shift. Sometimes he was over the top and so I would have to turn him off. I listened to Rush Limbaugh and had a lot of friends who listened to Rush Limbaugh and they made a point of taking their lunch break every day at noon so that they could listen.



My job was such that I couldn't do that but if I could get out I'd try to tune in although it didn't work out very often. I didn't really get into Rush Limbaugh until I could download the recordings and listen to them on a device at my own choice of time and then i thoroughly enjoyed it but i missed the whole radio experience i remember when we were going to travel to europe the first time in the early 1990s i was so excited to be able to listen to radio all in europe i had my walkman and i was all set to go it was a digital walkman and i made sure i had extra batteries we got there and this was before the internet was really anything for us to use and i learned when i got on the ground in england and in continental europe that their fm frequencies are even numbered my digital tuner and my walkman was odd numbered and would not do the even numbers and so if the radio station over there was 94.2 on the fm dial i could only get 94.1 or 94.3 and had to listen to a static key signal the entire time if i listened at all disappointing but i still did it once the internet grew and became easy enough i enjoyed listening to radio over the internet streaming i would listen to french dance music and British news reports sometimes I'd tune in and stream Italian radio but not very often.



I still do that when we're getting ready to travel internationally. I'll try to find a streaming radio station or two in the area that we're going and I'll listen for a little bit just to get a feel for the speech and the language and the feel for what they're advertising.



Now I really don't like commercials and so I really enjoy streaming music with no ads. I pay subscription fees to a couple of services to make sure i don't get any ads. I enjoyed XM satellite radio for many years but I got tired of them claiming to be "commercial free" and then between almost every song that I listened to on most of the stations that i listened to I had to listen to them talk about how great XM radio was and how everyone should subscribe and check out the other channels available on XM radio. This is the first year that i'm actually going to be free of XM radio and just go streaming completely or over the air.



My wife and I are gearing up for another international trip, so I searched the internet for a couple of radio stations in South America, and I started listening again, just to get a feel for the accent and what they're advertising.



Fun!