Escapism: a tech guide

Who else pegged 2020 as the year to grow, expand your horizons, maybe even travel and learn about other cultures? Because I did, and that has been… not working out. And how else can one keep busy besides the constant, unrelenting stream of movies and TV shows and podcasts and news articles? Days are now punctuated with the occasional alert from the vaguely threatening Duolingo owl, telling you you’d fallen behind on your Russian this week. (Just me? Ok then.)

It is this very year that inspired the Country Selector on Deezer. Doesn’t matter if, when you shut your eyes, all you see is the backs of your eyelids. Doesn’t matter if you can’t imagine what it would be like to sit along the Ipanema shore, or if you’ve forgotten what seagulls even sound like. If you want to, even for a blessed moment, pretend that everything is normal and you are somewhere else altogether, go on the selector in your settings and choose the country you have always wanted to visit, or the country to which you’d already bought and cancelled tickets. Watch your recommendations be flooded with music and playlists and podcasts from that place. Play it in the background, pretend that you’re in a hotel room listening to the top hits on the radio. Pretend you’re eavesdropping on a conversation that you can barely understand. If you’ve actually been good about keeping up with the rigorous language training, use the foreign podcasts as practice.

The best part is that, unlike air travel, Deezer makes it easy to bounce around the globe in no particular order. Done with your romp around Brazil? How about a quick stop to Japan, Egypt, Estonia? Deezer is in so many countries that you can be as exotic as you want. You’ll find artists you may never even have heard of, or eclectic music styles you otherwise would not have discovered.

Take yourself outside your four walls today.