Top Tips for Cheap Travel

Someone asked me on Tumblr yesterday, "How do you support yourself?" Actually, they left off the question mark, which made it feel more metaphoric/aggressive, so I'm not sure if this post will appeal to them. Anyways, I thought I'd write down some practical tips from my long-term travels.

1. Wwoof or find another way to live/work in a host family (Workaway and Helpx are two more options). WWOOF stands for "World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms." (I heard that it used to stand for "Willing Workers on Organic Farms," which I like better, since it has a bit of a Marxist ring to it.) Here is my post all about wwoofing.

This is my absolute #1 recommendation--by the end, I felt like I wasn't wwoofing in order to travel, but traveling in order to wwoof. You will meet amazing, idealistic, self-sufficient people, live in the most bizarre and isolated places, and get to know the traditions and the culture of places you're going. In exchange for about 6 hours of work a day, with 1 or 2 break days a week, you will get room and board and companionship.

My digs while wwoofing on Lygra Island, Norway

 Don't fear WWOOF Independents, the slightly less organized WWOOF website for countries with less farms. They may have less oversight from a national WWOOF coordinator, but I loved the fringy personalities I met in Norway when it didn't yet have a national organization, and I certainly never felt like I was about to get stabbed, except one time.

2. Stay in one place for a long time. I think three weeks at minimum. Or else I think it's really hard to get much a feel for any place, and I've found there's no emotional point in traveling (for me) if I'm just looking at important buildings and museums. It's all about emotions!!

3. The hostel-booking website Hostelworld. I think this might be the most popular hostel-booking website but I didn't know that until I started traveling last year and my far-traveling friend Julian recommended it. The reviews tend to be really accurate and it's easy and trustworthy to book rooms even in very far-away places.

I've never couchsurfed because I am too shy. It's okay, I think, not to couchsurf, though everyone constantly recommends it.

4. Flat souvenirs and presents. The best things I bought while traveling were old postcards and photos from flea markets. My friend Anastasia found some amazing children's books and posters when she was traveling in the Middle East, which was also very inspiring to me. These things tend to be cheap and very special, and you can give them away or use them to decorate your walls. And it's really fun to go to a flea market and dig through all the old photos and see what images stop you in your tracks.

My favorite flat souvenir, from the Porte de Clignancourt flea.

5. Bring a watercolor kit. The best one that still isn't too too expensive is the Cotman set from Windsor and Newton. This is basically the one I have and I love love love it.

Watercolors provide a dirt-cheap way to engage in a new way with the environment. You can make beautiful souvenirs or postcards, but they're also a pastime, a way to be alone without feeling like a weirdo, a way to productively appreciate the beauty all around you. If you hate drawing or painting, you can just do a color that you see, a shape, an impression--I've taken a lot of art classes but often the freshest and most interesting work comes from people who don't have a lot of technical skills, but do have a sensibility and an interest in paying attention.

 Michelle and I drew some of the first flowers to bloom at Nordvoll Farm, May 2013.

A favorite quote about art: "Attention is pure good. What brings states of high attention is successful as art without further ado." --Tim Allen and Andrew Duncan

By the same token, I recommend bringing a nice camera and a voice recorder. I felt much more content to skimp on other areas of travel (food, lodging, activities, daytrips, etc) when I could make art as I went along.

6. Go to a free museum and tell yourself that you only want to look at one thing. I'm realizing that a major theme of this list/my attitude is guilt-free travel. I tried to never put pressure on myself to see all the sights or cram more into each day. That sort of thing cancels out the wonder of travel for me, since it's all about finding the unexpected, and plus solo travel can be so draining.

So, for example, I went to the Louvre, which I could get into for free with my visa, and only planned to look at Napoleon III's chambers, though I also found some awesome medieval St. Lucy depictions (she's the saint who carries eyeballs on a plate!) and other pleasantly weird shit.

If you end up in NYC, my current hometown, you can go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for one cent (don't let them make you feel too guilty! You don't have to pay $25 or whatever they recommend!). The Vermeers might be the ultimate thing at the Met, but a more offbeat choice would be this amazing El Greco landscape called "View of Toledo" about which Julian wrote a poem.

7. Travel alone, then you can spend money only on what you like. I think that the feeling of loneliness in its negative form is more than counter-balanced by the feeling of not being beholden to anyone. You start to get used to yourself and what you like.

I've come to understand that I always want to go to places with animals, beautiful views, and old-fashioned or alternative lifestyles. I would never spend money on an alcoholic drink or a disco (except during the terrible imprisonment of study abroad!), but I'll spend a huge amount on food (particularly ramen and millionaire shortbread). For hostels, I'll always pick noisy and good atmosphere over quiet and buttoned-down, because I have no problem with earplugs. I can never bring myself to throw anything away (a terrible trait in a long-term traveler), so I try to avoid buying things that will overflow my suitcase, etc. It's all about knowing yourself.

Some expensive-ass ramen I ate in London at Bone Daddy's because I am a hog

8. You probably shouldn't go to Norway, it will kill your dirt-cheap soul. It was lovely but intolerably expensive. There is really no way at all to do it cheaply, even if you're only going to camp out the whole time. I found it very depressing that I didn't even have the funds to get a cup of coffee. The expense made it impossible to engage with locals in cities.

Still, if you feel like you won't go nuts spending $15 on a tiny slice of horrible pizza, see if you can wwoof at Nordvoll Farm, the northernmost wwoof place in the world, 200 miles above the Arctic Circle, where Roger Lockertsen may serve you whale under the midnight sun.

9. One last idea about money. While I was abroad last year Thought Catalog published this article called "Stop Telling Me to Travel, I Have No Money." I read this and felt both very lucky and very guilty, because the catalyst for me being able to travel came from my university, which gave me a grant to interview Norwegian farmers about their experiences with climate change. I understood Chloe Masterson's frustrations, and felt angry at all the people who encourage people to "find themselves via travel," without considering the privilege inherent in any kind of travel.

But I was really comforted by the commenters, a lot of whom disagreed with Masterson in a really interesting way. Lots of them wrote things to the effect of, "I have no money, but I travel anyway." And I realized I'd met a lot of those people--people who get temporary jobs for a few months in the US, make a few thousand dollars, and then set off in whatever direction they like. People who work at hostels or tutor English on the road, who have no savings at all, who return to the US when they can't make it any more, earn some more money, and leave again. People who really feel a compulsion. I like to think that, if you're willing to make it the top priority in your life, at the expense of comfort/security/privacy, you can go anywhere for however long you like.

Formal halls

Formal halls at Oxford are funny. I guess it varies from college to college. But despite all the beautiful settings, everyone seems concerned with making the students eat as quickly as possible, so they can set the tables again. Sometimes a dessert sauce (like custard) comes out during the salad course, which is confusing. But the dining halls themselves are gorgeous. I like rising for the Latin prayers, and the way you get severely scolded for being late.

Some of my friends at Oxford had complaints about the awkward way that the colleges stick to the letter of tradition, at the expense of convenience and good sense. (You might not get a high grade on an English paper because Tolkein got a high grade, and are you as good as Tolkein?) But when I look back on my college graduation more than a year ago, from a school aggressively interested in staying with the times, my biggest sadness is how disconnected I felt from Harvard's tradition and its centuries of students, and how little I understood the meaning of my education there. In Sever, I'd try so hard to hold in my mind a sense of all the learning that had gone on in each classroom before me, but I'd draw a blank. It felt almost like a stage set. And without being able even to notice or engage with my surroundings, how could I feel anything for the mystery plays and bildungsromans I read there? The gate, the library steps, the ringing bell: all only reminded me of me and my immediate friends. A horrible feeling, like forgetting something very important.

Anyway, at Oxford you can't stay long in the dining halls, but at Harvard people study and talk in them at all hours. 

Lygra, 2012

Forest breakfast

Cape Cod, 2010

Highlight of the day

Seeing this post, from this tumblr, in my reader.

Starting to wonder--do I feel uglier when I'm never around people? (The answer must be yes.) Do I overeat more when I feel fat? (The answer must be yes.) What other things work like this? When a good thing happens, I feel sad because I know how quickly it will fade.

Teju Cole: "I became aware of just how fleeting the sense of happiness was, and how flimsy its basis: A warm restaurant after having come in from the rain, the smell of food and wine, interesting conversation, daylight falling weakly on the polished cherrywood of the tables. It took so little to move the mood from one level to another, as one might push pieces on a chessboard. Even to be aware of this, in the midst of a happy moment, was to push one of those pieces, and to become slightly less happy." Open City, p. 131.

ETA: This is the first post I've written since Norway that seems to me exactly like the posts I wrote in Norway.

Oslo, August 31

It's a Norwegian film directed by Joachim Trier and starring Anders Danielsen Lie. It's about a former drug addict (Lie) on a trip back to Oslo for a job interview. It was released this summer but I only got around to watching it now--which is kind of a shame, because I don't think I'm going back to Norway anytime soon, so it can't really catch me in the act.

I was satisfied to see that Oslo is not portrayed as a joyful place (to say the least). I don't think I've ever traveled anywhere that seemed quite so impervious to joy, or even skippiness that you can, on solitary walks, augment via iPod with some upbeat indie rock. There were some extraordinary factors against me: my hostel, which Lonely Planet described as "barracks-like," was an actual barracks; at breakfast (my only inexpensive meal), everything that looked like salami was actually fish, in ham-red slices; I could not afford normal meals so ate nothing but 7-11 raisin rolls and plain cream cheese for four days, so hungry that I stopped going out to conserve energy; and right before leaving the US I had had an end-of-days fight with a friend. (What would Oslo have been like if I had limitless funds? I would have maybe eaten more or seen more, but I certainly wouldn't have made any more friends, because I actually don't know how.)

Meanwhile, what Anders in the movie has against him is his years of addiction and tenuous recovery, ruinous debt, nothing to look forward to, and constant temptation. Unlike me, he has old friends (though he confuses every one of them by being too forward and offensive while also being meek and indecisive), memories everywhere, and a good grasp of Norwegian, so that when he sits in a coffee shop he can hear that people all around him are leading normal and possibly joyful lives.

I think many of my suburban cohort grew up with a "The O.C." vision of drugs, violence, depression or whatever, that is to say, a romantic vision where these things lead to extremely interesting high-stakes gossip, love against all odds, people proving themselves and rising above, maturity, knowledge, authenticity. This is awful for two reasons: first, because it's a representation of a secret, not-much-discussed world, so that as a young and blessed person you think there has to be some truth there (though I realy like Intervention for its unflinching counterpoint), and second, because even if your friends start doing terrible things, like those strangling-games and inhalants so popular in suburbia, which seem a world away from the intensity of the O.C., or even the suicide-threats of people like my eighth-grade boyfriend, or the many other terrible things that even the blessed young people manage to experience--you never notice that this is exactly what the O.C. was going on about, and that "authenticity" is a sham. And then you become old and everyone starts getting into real problems or dying and no one even cares because everyone else's people are dying!

"Oslo, August 31" cares about this seriously dying person, but it doesn't ever attempt to prove to you that you should, by making Anders especially sympathetic, moralizing about him, or even giving us a clue about why he keeps acting this way. He comes from a middle-class background; his parents care about him and are changing their lives to pay for his treatment. I think the film's greatest strength is its unpredictability, which conflicts in a friendly way with all my recent worries about creating suspense, a plot, an emotional bond. I recently read some writer's advice that said we should be able to look at the end of the story and think, well, given that character's choices, it could not have worked out any other way--logic and inevitability. "Oslo, August 31" lacks this causality; nothing had to happen the way it did, so it is also engaged with the question of what makes a narrative or character seem credible and whole to us, and how an addled mind can remove credibility while adding the grit of the real.

One time I was embarrassed

 From the chapter on girls in the "What's Happening to my Body? Book for Boys."

Today I braided my hair with one mirror in front of me and one mirror behind me and still it was ugly.

The day before I graduated I suddenly missed the walk--the walk that is so boring it used to make me grit my teeth--the walk from a Mass Ave gate behind Widener, through that corner of the yard past Lamont, up to the Carpenter Center, on a drizzly spring day. I thought: I have turned the corner towards understanding! This is what I will miss!

In high school a woman came to tell us about the dangers of eating disorders. She told us she developed her disorder in college after she heard two friends commenting on an older girl's weight. "Did you see Katie?" they'd said. "She really put on the freshman 15!" And so, the woman lecturing us told us, in that moment she decided that she would never let anyone say that about her.

Last spring I saw a class of 2011 girl post a bland and pathetic Harvard admissions video on her Facebook wall, with views of the Charles, the Yard, students eating in Annenberg, and so on. "Sigh..." she captioned it. "I miss Harvard so much!" And I was horrified. Is that what graduating college does--turns you into such an undiscriminating emotional mess that even the most canned images seem to bring back something essential about your experience? (Yes.)

Anyway, after I came back to Harvard for one day on my way to Norway, I visited the Signet, where I ran into a friend a year younger than me. We started talking about our summers, and she asked about mine. I told her I'd spent a lot of time this summer thinking about what graduating means, and what college meant, and what Harvard means, and what the campus would mean once I knew no undergraduates, and things like that. And she, just like I would have done last fall, or really at any point, was immediately interested, and wanted to talk all about all of that, and see what conclusions I had come to, and I wanted to hear what she expected it would be like, so we could finally figure out the difference between having one foot out the door and being out the door. But soon more people arrived and we never had a chance. I used to wander around the campus, which is of course precisely manicured and lovely, and think, this is the richest I will ever be.

Harvard

When I listen to that song "Gemini/Birthday Song," the anthem of 2008-2012, I can't help thinking about one of my more embarrassing moments. It was Halloween and I was heartbroken. My friends brought me to a punk house, where I tried hard to fit in. "This is Molly," my friend introduced me. "Molly's really smart." (She was just trying to give my awkwardness a legitimate frame.) "Oh yeah, super, super smart," I said, giggling insanely, like I was trying to work the eccentric angle or something, or trying to catch everyone off guard. Like jpeggings, those jeggings covered in html and other Internet graphics, arrogant, giggling eccentricity works better in the conceptual stages. We took a tour of this big old bungalow that had been subdivided with curtains of dried flowers and webs of yarn and mismatched windows into bunk beds and tiny spaces. One person's bunk bed had a playpark slide coming out of it. And on one particularly lovely keep of driftwood planks and crude paintings (the kinds of paintings featuring line-drawings of pimply characters with their tongues hanging out), a girl was just waking up, with her hair all on one side, and because in that moment I believed myself to be cool, I aimed up and took a flash photo. Only after I developed the photo did I realize how much she hated me.

Pulling out in the silent, dark bus from Milano Centrale to Malpensa, the midnight bus--I was going to sleep in the airport, on a wire bench, according to Sleepinginairports.net, and I did not realize how much they hurt your thighs, even if you think of yourself as having big, insensitive thighs--I saw the most beautiful photograph that I could never take. It was one of those moments that is too perfect for a story and too beautiful for real life. On this hot Milan midnight, in the drought of late August, there was a girl sitting at the base of the huge dry fountain across from the train station. The bus made a slow semi-circle around the fountain so I got to see this girl, knees up to her chest, illuminated by the sulferous street lights, from every angle. I was so positive she was sulking after heartbreak.

Welcome to Norwegian winter

Have you ever had a dream where you opened a closet door in your house and found a whole other wing that you'd never realized was there? My mother told me she has those dreams, and then I started having them too. The house across the street from us (formerly Henry Louis Gates's house, then the house of a murderer who went to prison for life without possibility of parole, but has since been released) was designed by the same architect, but is two or three times larger, and my mother told me that going around that house is like having that dream. My sister and I went over for the estate sale, after the murder. They even sold the childrens' worn-out teddy bears.

When high school was ending, I had the feeling that I was living in a stage set. This would seem to be the opposite of, but is actually closely related to, the feeling that any door could open up on a whole new section of a building. I love stage sets. I am entranced by stage props. I read every single thing I could find on the making of the sets and props for the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. I have always loved making props. As a kid I made fake menus for nonexistent restaurants, fake quizzes for nonexistent classes, fake questionnaires for nonexistent polls. In college I made a life-sized cow, among other props, but the props of fantasy worlds for films are really what interests me, so much so that I looked into how I could go to LA and apprentice for a propmaker. I don't want to give up that dream yet.

Tomorrow is my last day on Lygra, and the island is beginning to take on a bit of that stage-set feeling. There are many doors I have not opened yet, and now I don't have time anymore. The surface of things is always a disappointment, but the depth of things often does not exist in the way you wish it would.

We went through about 20 seasons of weather today--hail to rain to sunshine, then intense wind, wet now, then blizzardlike snow blowing horizontally across the fields, then sun ("Maybe we'll have a snowbow!" I said to Robert, who was not amused), repeat. The water is choppier than I've ever seen it. But even at the stormiest the sky has been pearly and translucent gray. It is not a dense sky, more of a liquid one. I've been thinking about that good old literary cliché, "the sky was the color of brushed steel," "the sky was the color of brushed tin," "the sky was the color of aluminum." Even Teju Cole in Open City falls victim to this simile ("The sun was setting as I left Columbia Presbyterian, giving the sky the look of tin," p. 20), and I bet I have too, because I like those two different weights/textures together. Anyway, the Lygra sky is too lively for all of that.

The Rules of the Game

I recently bought this book on "the art of attraction" for a guy I know, and of course I read most of it first. (One of my college boyfriends had this book on his shelf, and I was amazed that he wasn't embarrassed about it. I was embarrassed enough for the both of us and never looked at it.) The book's best section is the section of "Routines," actual scripts for how to start a conversation, or how to move towards the first kiss, etc. One of the routines (meant for "demonstrating value" to a girl you just met) purports to reveal your innermost motivation in three questions.

1. "If you had to choose one thing you need to have in your life in order to feel like life is worthwhile, what would it be?" (Alternatively: "Name something you really enjoy doing.")
2. "Okay, if you have [worthwhile thing] in your life, what kinds of things does that allow you to do or experience?" (Alternatively: "Describe your perfect experience of [worthwhile thing].")
3. "Okay, imagine a time in the future or even now when you have [worthwhile thing] in your life. And this enables you to do [various things]. How would that make you feel inside?" (The answer should be more specific than "good" or "happy.")

The answer to question number three is your "core value." Now the guy doing the hitting-on is supposed to recommend, "Whenever you have to make an important life decision, whether it's about a job or a guy or a friend, just ask yourself if it brings you closer to that [feeling] feeling." (If you want to read the whole thing, it's on the Amazon "Surprise me!" preview, pp 245-246.) Imagine having this conversation at a bar! It would only work if everyone was a drunk. It's like hitting on someone by ripping open their chest! (C.f. fav ever Mary Gaitskill metaphor, from "A Romantic Weekend": "His gaze penetrated her so thoroughly, it was as though he had thrust his hand into her chest and begun feeling her ribs one by one.")

What is your answer to question three? The conclusion of the questionnaire caught me off guard, and as a result I think my answer does reflect something true about me. My answer was "not lonely." Which is why it's funny that I've ended up here, in a country where I don't have any friends and have no ideas or plans for how to meet some. Someday soon, my personality might flip inside out, and the embarrassment and trouble of using the Internet to find friends will seem less awful than my very complete loneliness.

Until then, I have been thinking a lot about a new word to describe extended travel, namely, "Renunciation." This is from Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be, and she is quoting the I Ching: "RENUNCIATION: Voluntary retreat brings good fortune to the superior man, and downfall to the inferior man" (76). I'm not as interested in whether I will turn out superior or inferior (probably the latter)--the sticking point is more, why would you retreat (reject, abandon) voluntarily? (I also keep thinking about what, exactly, characterizes a Pyrrhic victory.) This seems utterly different (and better, for now) than my previous thought about extended travel, from Tobias Wolff's Paris Review interview: "It's good for a while to be dropped through the bottom, to be a little helpless, to have to scramble to make do, because as you get older, you do less and less of that, and it's good for you, it takes the rust off." I wasn't rusting in college, I was having the time of my fucking life.