Go For Broke

Broke

Dec. 2011

Go For

road trip across

america

50

ways to eat, drink & sleep on a backpacker’s budget

At CouchSurfing International, we envision a world where everyone can explore and create meaningful connections with the people and places they encounter. The appreciation of diversity spreads tolerance and creates a global community.

just don’t be this guy.

the world is smaller than you think.

couchsurfing.org

Go For

Broke Jusmine Martin

editor-in-chief

Dave Eggers managing editor

Jusmine Martin creative director

Samantha Frandino photo editor

Mark Zuckerberg web editor

Donald Trump production

« Congratulations, flickr user Philip Klinger on being this month’s photo contest winner! »

“Like” us on facebook for a chance to have your photos printed in GFB’s next issue.

travel notes

There are those who travel, and those who travel well.

I believe traveling well rarely means traveling extravagantly. This has much to do

with the fact that, until recently, I could barely afford rent, never mind a rental car. (until yesterday, I had never owned a blender.)

Regardless, GFB believes it’s possible, plausible & necessary to go on as many new adventures as your wallet will allow.

In our Q&A this month, Elizabeth Gilbert talks to us about living for $15 per day and why it’s important to be an integrated traveler.

we agree. The best way to learn anything about a new place

is to live like a local—eat, drink, sleep and explore in places you can’t view online from a cursory Google image search.

But if someone were to come to your city (like the couch surfers on page 11), would you know where to take them?

This issue, our writers traveled across America in search of the best places off the grid and came back overzealous and under budget.

so forget the ritz carlton.

Give me Ritz Bits, gas station coffee, the open road, a crammed two-door sedan and some Johnny Cash and I’ll be the happiest broke cliché around.

Jusmine Martin Editor-in-Chief

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What’s inside

a foodie’s road trip across america

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sleeping with strangers: the couch-surfing phenomenon

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new york for cheap

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worth-while lessons from obnoxious tourists

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green travel products

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17

books

elizabeth gilbert talks travel

“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” —James Michener gfb.com december 2011

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how to Broke Books go broke

the backpackers’ bar guide: nyc Five dives in and around Manhattan that sell short but pour long by anna starostinetskaya & kenneth hyman McSorely’s, East Village

Photo courtesy of nymag.com

Proud to be the oldest, still operating saloon in New York City, McSorely’s is as known for its two-for-$5 beer specials as its vast history. (Abe Lincoln threw back a few here; Houdini’s handcuffs are on the bar rail.) If you order anything off the spartan menu, make it the cheese and onion plate. To female patrons: you were allowed to vote in 1919, but have only been allowed to walk into McSorley’s starting 1970, so grab a couple beers and make the best of it.

Art Bar, West Village

It doesn’t take long to discover the meaning behind its name: an eclectic mix of chairs and couches ranging from guido leathers to renaissance period pieces line dimly lit and quirky

America’s 7 Best Beer Cities With an influx of creative craft breweries, these cities are changing the way we drink and appreciate beer, according to esquire.com.

1. Chicago, IL 2. Denver, CO 3. New York, NY 4. Philadelphia, PA 5. Portland, OR 6. St. Louis, MO 7. San Diego, CA

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Rosemary’s Greenpoint Tavern’s owner is as notorious as the bar itself.

decorated walls. (Think the last supper, only with Mick Jagger playing Jesus and other iconic figures like Elvis and James Dean in place of da Vinci’s apostles.) Despite the artsy, upscale ambiance, mixed drinks range from $6-8, making Art Bar a great place to spend a chill night. Try the curly fries ($3.95) for a taste of their equally impressive pub food menu.

Trailer Park, Chelsea

How this place landed smack in the middle of Chelsea is a mystery.

Conversation pieces at Trailer Park include a toilet bowl ashtray filled with raggedy flowers, a pregnant mannequin smoking a cigarette over the bar, garage door windows and pink lawn flamingos. While the menu is fitting to the theme, a bit of Chelsea still peeks out. Alongside the trailer burgers, chili, nachos and mac & cheese, you’ll find slimmer veggie and turkey burgers (paired with sweet potato fries or tater tots). For a break from swanky Chelsea nightlife, stop in the Trailer and get ‘er done.

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Rosemary’s greenpoint Tavern, Williamsburg

We love bars run by old people. At Rosemary’s, grandma shoves 32 ounces of styrofoam-outfitted beer down your throat for about $4 a pop. The decor is reminiscent of your parents’ basement, and if you’re lucky enough to catch Rosemary (in business for over 50 years) behind the bar, you’re in for a good laugh. Patrons generally range from drunken ex-convicts to hipsters pretending their trust funds have run out—but what else did you expect from a Williamsburg dive?

Blue and GOld Tavern, East Village

This old standby boasts $5 shot-andbeer specials (the Dirty Hipster, for example includes Jägermeister and Pabst Blue Ribbon) until 1 a.m. PBRs are plentiful, and mixed drinks run as little as $3 all night long. Stay long enough to play pool on the ratty table and mine the juke’s selection of hits from the ‘60s to the ‘80s. But if at all possible, use the bathroom elsewhere— don’t say we didn’t warn you. 

an ode to the tourist

Budget travelers can learn from a Griswold

multiple modes of sun protection

by rolf potts a smile that says,

“i love my family”

Photo courtesy of Getty Images

wardrobe choices courtesy of “that guy”

outlandish shoe-to-sock ratio

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A few years ago, when the tide of war was shifting in Afghanistan, Northern Alliance troops began using a contemptuous moniker for the Pakistani, Uzbek, and Chechen militants who were fighting alongside the Taliban. “The [Afghan] people,” Alliance commander Ustad Mohammed Atta told TIME magazine, “want to kill these tourists.”

Not “terrorists”, mind you, “tourists.”

Obviously, the pejorative sense of that word had come a long way since European elites first sneered at the English commoners who took Thomas Cook’s inaugural group tours in the 19th century.

Moreover, it seems we have come to the point where “tourist” — like “asshole”, or “politically correct” — has no meaning but the pejorative, and would never be a term anyone would apply to oneself.

As John Flinn noted in his recent San Francisco Chronicle column, “among the status-conscious, the word ‘tourist’ has come to mean ‘anyone who travels in a style I consider inferior to the way I like to think I do it.’”

Or, as Evelyn Waugh put it a couple generations ago, “the tourist is always the other chap.”

Flinn goes on to make a good argument for dropping the tourist-traveler debate altogether — but somehow I doubt the travel milieu will ever lose its snarky obsession with “tourists”. An illustrative case in point would be that of travel writer Daisann McLane, who made a well-stated case for why we’re all “tourists” in a 2002 interview with World Hum. “We think a ‘traveler’ is cool, the ‘tourist’ is not,” she said, “and there’s a lot of snobbery attached to identifying oneself as the former. But I think we should let that go. We are all tourists. If you can afford a round trip ticket to Laos, and you go there for personal stimulation, not for a job, even if you end up staying for six months on the floor of a Hmong hut in a remote village, you’re still a tourist." 

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Beer ,

burgers,

&breakfast

A foodie’s road trip across America

By Patrick Ottenhoff

gfb.com november 2011 gfb.com december 2011

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recently drove across America for a new job and had the privilege of tasting some of the best of what America has to offer. I ate crab cakes in Baltimore, brats in Sheboygan, and fish tacos in San Jose. I enjoyed Mexican food in Virginia, Cornish pasties in Nevada, and Italian beef in Chicago. I crushed fully loaded Five Guys burgers, “Animal Style” In-N-Out burgers, and Culver's ButterBurgers with Wisconsin cheddar and bacon.

Before I get into the details of the trip, I have to add the disclaimer that my road trip did not take me through Dixie, the Southwest, or Philly/Jersey/ New York.* A discussion about the best food in America without including those regions is like talking about the best pitchers of all time and omitting Greg Maddux, Nolan Ryan, and Roger Clemens. It's just not accurate.

But I could visit only so many places on my food adventure. In the course of two weeks, I drove my 4Runner from the Chesapeake Bay to the San Francisco Bay, taking numerous pit stops and mini-vacations along the way to eat with my family, friends, and girlfriend. We dined at dives and four-star restaurants and ate healthy and junk. I surely missed some legendary spots along the way, but as with any good survey, I think I took a pretty solid sample.

Industrial Heartland (Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago)

I began in Baltimore with crab cakes at Ryleigh's Oysters. I'd usually choose to pick my crabs, but Ryleigh's was good.

If you want the best crab cakes in the Mid-Atlantic, your best bet is Faidley's Market in Baltimore or Kinkead's in D.C. My next stop was Pittsburgh, where I hit Primanti Brothers for the Almost Famous Pitts-Burger cheesesteak. It's really a burger patty (not a Philly-style steak), topped with provolone**, tomato, and slaw, and stuffed with fries. Legend has it that founder Joe Primanti, who started the business from a cart in downtown Pittsburgh during the Great Depression, put fries on the sandwiches so that steelworkers and truckers could eat a full meal on the job with one hand. With Bruce Springsteen on the soundtrack singing about “the mills that built the tanks

and bombs that won this country's wars,” I cruised across the rest of America's industrial heartland.

I ended up in Chicago in front of what was perhaps the best sandwich of my trip. The Big Al contains slices of roast beef soaked in seasoned juices with sweet and hot peppers (giardiniera), served on an Italian hoagie roll dipped back in the juice. It's unreal.

Chicagoans have fiercely debated the best Italian beef in town but my money's on Al's.

Another point of pride in the Windy City is the Chicago dog— “served with mustard, relish, freshly chopped onions, sliced red ripe tomatoes, kosher pickle and short peppers piled onto a perfectly steamed poppy seed bun.” I'll personally take a New York dog, but Portillo's does a pretty good version of Chicago style.

I ate three Portillo's dogs and drank two Miller Lites as my grandma and I watched the Cubs commit four errors and blow a 6-2 lead. Just another day in Chicago.

I put Chicago's skyscrapers in my rear-view and headed out on the Illinois prairie, where the skyline is interrupted only occasionally by grain elevators, water towers, and Presbyterian church steeples. I stopped to visit President Reagan's boyhood home in Dixon and President Grant's home in Galena. It's here on the Illinois prairie that the Industrial Heartland fades into America's Breadbasket and Dairyland.

America's Breadbasket and Dairyland (Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska)

“I'd been warned by students of authentic North American eats that I was in for a treat when I came to the Breadbasket,” former Washington Post reporter Joel Garreau wrote when he coined the term for this region. “This was the land, I'd been told, for which the 1957 Chevrolet and warm summer nights were invented. Nowhere, my tutors assured me, could one indulge in a ten-course meal-on-the-move as on the Plains.”

Two hours north of Chicago is Sheboygan, a town on the shores of Lake Michigan, known worldwide for bratwurst. Within 15 minutes of Sheboygan is Oostburg, a DutchAmerican village where my greatgrandparents settled, and Johnsonville,

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COLORADO IS A schizophrenic state. in two hours, you can go from a day in big sky country to a white-out on fremont pass. namesake of the brats you find in the supermarket. On the outskirts of Sheboygan is Gosse's Northwestern House. They know how to do brats here—grilled and soaked in beer/ butter, served with onion, pickle, and mustard on a Kaiser roll so that the grease, mustard, and butter mix.

Culinary and political heritages still run deep in Wisconsin. Counties such as Sheboygan, which were settled by Germans, are overwhelming Republican, while those settled by, say, Norwegians, vote very Democratic.

What they have in common is a great appreciation for the Holy Trinity of sausage, beer, and Aaron Rodgers.

Moving west, Iowa is all about corn, but boy they do a good burger.

I stopped in Waterloo at Culver's for a ButterBurger with cheddar and bacon, “served atop the lightly buttered, toasted bun that Culver's made famous,” accompanied with wavy fries on the side. After stopping at the Iowa Cubs' ballpark in Des Moines to pay tribute to the AAA farm team, it was a straight shot to Omaha.

The Missouri River separates the rolling Iowa prairie flush with corn fields and hog farms, from the flatter Nebraska plains, where wheat and cattle reign. Geographically about halfway across America, Leo's Diner in Omaha is home to the nation's best breakfast sandwich. The Benson contains fried egg, American cheese, Swiss cheese, hash browns, and your choice of bacon, sausage, or ham. I went with bacon and sausage on thickcut wheat bread.

With a full belly, I again turned west and followed the Platte River and the Union Pacific line across the plains.

I pitted in North Platte, a rail yard town, and rolled past depressing-

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looking joints like the Hub Bar and Rodeo Bar. Alan Jackson played on the stereo and served as a perfect soundtrack for those emptying towns on the High Plains. “Boarded up like they never existed, Or renovated and called historic districts.”

Powder and Petroleum (Aspen, Park City, Elko)

Colorado is a schizophrenic state, home to towns as wildly different as liberal Boulder and conservative Colorado Springs. In two hours, you can go from a sunny day in big sky country to a white-out on Fremont Pass to a red, dry desert with bighorn sheep roaming the hills. The mountains are forbidding, and “except for mining and skiing, few would have followed the Ute Indians and settled there.” The Almanac notes that “The miners who tracked gold and silver and lead ores also built Victorian towns with opera houses and gingerbread storefronts in Aspen and Telluride.”

Aspen hosts a wealth of great food, but L'Hostaria and Jimmy's stand out.

L'Hostaria is an Italian restaurant with a great Saltimbocca alla Romana and a mean wine list; Jimmy's is the kind of restaurant a foodie would love with creations such as mac-n-cheese with bacon and jalapeno. But Aspen's real gem is the Main Street Bakery, which serves Eggs Alaska, a Benedict with Norwegian salmon, grilled tomato, and dill hollandaise.

My next destination after Aspen was Park City, but between these powder havens is petroleum country.

Colorado's Picceane Basin and Utah's Uinta Basin are home to some of America's most productive oil and gas wells. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the Picceane Basin holds 1.525 trillion barrels of oil shale resources; by comparison, Saudi Arabia has 260 billion of crude. Driving through towns like Rifle, Rangely, or Roosevelt, it is not uncommon to see mud-caked F-150's emblazoned with Halliburton logos on their doors.

Park City got its start as a mining town, and locals will tell you that skiers in the 1960s would ride a rail car down a shaft to the heart of the mountain and then take a mining elevator to the summit. Today, Park City is a winter resort and home of the No Worries Café. This restaurant near the top of

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Parley's Summit serves the Dante's Inferno—”Sirloin tips, hot Italian sausage, tomatoes, spinach, two cheeses and fresh garlic tossed in a green pepper sauce, served frittata style and topped with savory Hollandaise and Cajun dust.”

I descended into Salt Lake and across the State of Deseret. I let the horses sing on the straightaways of the Bonneville Salt Flats and great basins of Nevada. In Elko, I listened to one of the most colorful libertarian

THE RULES » No meal should exceed $20, unless accompanied by multiple alcoholic beverages » No chain restaurants (with the sole exception of In ‘N Out Burger) » Take every local’s restaurant recommendation » Practice a “taste over calorie count” mentality » Never eat at the same place more than once » Have fun, be safe, etc (you’re welcome, Mom) rants I'd ever heard, as the proprietor of B.J. Bulls told me stories about the “pig cops” in my native Virginia enforcing the speed limit. This is Ron Paul Country. B.J. Bulls serves Cornish pasties and sells them by the hundreds to the miners. I had a beef/potato/ onion pastie and took a chicken/rice for the road.

Towns in Nevada were built to serve the Central Pacific Railroad and sprung up almost perfectly every 60 miles. Today, I-80 follows the same route carved by the railroad in the 1860s and connects the same towns: 59 miles between Elko and Argenta; 68 miles to Winnemucca; 60 miles to Oreano; 75 miles to Wadsworth. I rode with Waylon and Willie, listening to songs about mama, trucks, trains, prison, and getting drunk. I crossed the border near Reno and spent the night

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in the railroad town of Truckee in the High Sierra.

California (San Francisco, Half Moon Bay, Mountain View, San Jose)

One of the many absurd aspects of California is that restaurants are required by state law to put calories on every menu item. Still, the Golden State has some great food traditions.

One of the most popular practices in California is to put avocado on an otherwise ordinary dish and call it the “California” version. Burger King offers the “California Whopper” (a Whopper with guacamole) and a wings joint called Smoke Eaters in Santa Clara offers the “Californian” (buffalo chicken with guacamole).

The Bay Area's Mediterranean climate lends itself to world-class vineyards in the cooler valleys to the north and productive orchards in the more arid valleys to the south. Silicon Valley was once “a landscape of orchards supplying half of the world's dried prunes,” according to National Geographic. “Even through the [1960s], it bloomed with plums, pears, apricots, and cherries, one of the nation's most bountiful agricultural regions.”

Today, the Central Valley accounts for less than 1 percent of the nation's farmland by acre, but yields over 8 percent of its agricultural output. But while San Francisco liberals enjoy the valley's bounty and praise “buying local,” they also support policies that squeeze the farmer dry. Environmentalists recently turned off the irrigation taps for San Joaquin Valley farmers to protect baitfish upstream, devastating the Valley economy and leading to Detroit-level unemployment in these mostly Hispanic towns.

Mexicans have been a part of life in California since the land was a province of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, and thankfully, taquerias are everywhere. I tried many of these taco shacks, but my favorite was Taqueria La Bamba in Mountain View.

This dimly lit joint was packed with Mexicans and gringos alike eating at stand-up counters. I had a carnitas taco and fish taco, both with pico, onions, cilantro, and jalapeno, and chased them with a cold Modelo.

I also found a Caribbean place that seems like it was lifted out of Queens

or South Florida. Back-a-Yard serves the best jerk I've ever tasted and is operated by a chef whose culinary adventures have taken him from Jamaica to Antwerp to Menlo Park. I loved the jerk chicken/pork combo, grilled with a “fiery mixture of spices, including Scotch bonnet pepper, pimento, nutmeg, and thyme,” and served with fried plantains, rice, and beans.

California is maybe the most international state in the Union, but it also prides itself in maintaining some American traditions like baseball and burgers. In my first night in the Bay Area, I caught a Giants game (unfortunately, it was the Buster Posey demolition game). I was impressed by what seemed like a playoff atmosphere on a Tuesday night, but more impressed with the signature garlic fries.

AT&T Park has some of the best food in the bigs, but I'll still take a Ben's half-smoke “all the way” at Nationals Park.

I also made a pilgrimage to the famous In-N-Out Burger, where I got a Double-Double, Animal Style; Animal-Style fries; and a chocolate shake. “Animal Style” for you Easterners is “A mustard-cooked beef patty with additional pickles, cheese, spread and grilled onions diced up and mixed together on the grill.” In-N-Out burgers are excellent, but I'm sorry, Californians, it takes the silver to Five Guys's gold. It just can't measure up to Five Guys's toppings and fries.

New England (Nantucket)

After traveling over 3,500 miles, I made the next logical move and caught a red-eye from SFO to BOS. I spent Memorial Day with my family in Massachusetts, where we had our traditional Figawi dinner: Lobster, chowdah, corn-on-the-cob, and Whales Tale Pale Ale on our porch. I could write another 2,000 words about clambakes, rawbars, keepers, blues, and shineboxes, but I'll save that for the next chapter of my food adventures.

* To make up for this omission, I ordered a New Haven pizza from Pete's New Haven Style pizza in D.C. ** The first Pitts-Burger I ever ate was at the Winter Classic with whiz.

Big Cheeser // Joe’s Cantina in Phoenix.

Triple Hoagie Challenge // Nashville’s Sunset Brew.

Eggs Alaska // Main Street Bakery in Aspen.

This article originally appeared in The Atlantic Monthly.

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Broke Books

Sleeping with

Strangers

By Penelope Green

A couch is plenty for the young and networked traveler

Broke Books

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eil Medel’s Manhattan domicile is certainly homey, but it is by no means spacious. Just 7 feet by 10 feet, with its one window overlooking St. Marks Place, it is a living room in miniature, a mere haiku of a place. Mr. Medel, who is 33 and works for an importing company, sleeps on a loft platform that he shares with 40 pairs of blue jeans that rise in untidy stacks, and blue plastic tubs stuffed with other belongings.

Nonetheless, the Philippine-born Mr. Medel is an eager and generous host at least three days out of seven to like-minded visitors from Los Angeles, Texas, Sweden, Germany and points beyond. Mr. Medel is a couch surfer, as are his guests; he and they find one another through the Couch Surfing Project, at couchsurfing.com, a threeyear-old global community built on a MySpace/Facebook model of personal profiles connected through a network of “friends.” According to statistics on the site, it has well over 300,000 members from more than 31,000 towns and cities around the world.

The group’s philosophy is also its method, which might be summed up this way: I will offer you my couch free, along with the company of my friends and a tour of my favorite spots in my city. In return, you will give of yourself, and not just slink into my home at 3 a.m. after you’ve done your own tour of my city. In this way, we will be friends, if only for a day or two.

Or, as its mission statement proclaims: “Participate in creating a better world, one couch at a time.”

Couch surfing takes an ancient notion of hospitality and tucks it into a thoroughly modern paradigm, the social networking Web site. But, as its members say sternly, it is not a site for dating, or for freeloaders.

“It’s a lifestyle and a commitment,” Mr. Medel said. He and his fellow New York hosts meet at least one night a week at a bar in Union Square, new surfers in tow. They throw birthday parties for one another and mount what they call invasions of other cities, as 30 or so New York surfers did last summer in Boston, strewing themselves on the couches of 30 or so Bostonians for three days.

“I think the beauty of the present century is that more and more folks are defining their home inwardly.”

Inevitably, there have been couch surfing romances, marriages and even babies, said Sherry Huckabee, 41, a couch surfer from Charlotte, N.C., who is now living in Romania since falling in love with her host, Hans Hedrich, last summer, ending a two-year surf of Europe. Now Ms. Huckabee and Mr. Hedrich, 36, who runs a charitable foundation devoted to sustainable tourism, are hosts to 20 young surfers at a time: Mr. Hedrich, Ms. Huckabee said proudly, has an open-couch policy.

A Kerouac mind-set inspired Ms. Huckabee to write a novel about her couch surfing experiences. Three years ago she was a lawyer in Charlotte, divorced for some years and facing an empty nest, as her children had left home. “It was a huge reconsideration of self,” she said. “Who was I if not wife, mother, etc.? I wanted to find a sense of carrying my home with me, and to do that I needed to let go of the sense that there was a home somewhere waiting for me.”

She gave away most of her belongings and set off on what was to be a three-month tour of Italy. That’s where she discovered couch surfing.

What kept her surfing were the sorts of details that delight a writer’s eye: the Algerian host in Paris who slept with a poster of Monica Bellucci above his bed so he could imagine falling asleep in her arms each night; a Bulgarian family’s grim Soviet-era concrete housing, which, when you opened the door, was like a tropical island, painted in bright greens and blues; the northern European woman who had not worked in three years and had not cleaned her bathroom in that time, either, it seemed, yet who nonetheless borrowed a bottle of wine from a neighbor to welcome Ms. Huckabee.

Back home in Charlotte, Ms. Huckabee said,

“if you don’t have a guest bedroom, you don’t have company.” She added: “Even your family stays in a hotel. Even for dinner, there is this sense you have to go through this process: get out the vacuum cleaner, wash the sheets. In Europe there’s the couch and that’s it.

There’s no dusting. It’s more of a view into other people’s worlds, instead of this idealized thing where everything is clean and tidied up.”

In an age of cheap airfares and porous borders, where nearly every corner of the earth, from Bulgaria to Bhutan, is open for tourism, the home is the final frontier, the last authentic experience. Instead of being in some sanitized hotel in Hanoi, said Erik Torkells, editor of Budget Travel magazine, “if I couch surf I could be on some cool ex-pat’s or local’s sofa.”

He added: “I’ve already leapfrogged barriers. It would take weeks under ordinary circumstances to get in someone’s home.”

With regard to “the whole MySpace thing,” he added: “This is a generation that’s all about talking to strangers. And why stop there? Why not crash at their place?”

Then Mr. Torkells, 38, asked plaintively: “This is for the young, right? I don’t even want to sleep on my sister’s couch.”

Just before noon one day last week, Marisol Montoya, a 25-year-old filmmaker from Los Angeles, was rolling up her red silk pajamas and tucking them next to the red fuzzy slippers in her suitcase. She had spent two nights on Mr. Medel’s tiny couch, which was no trial, she said, because she had been dancing hard most nights and liked to elevate her feet by hanging them over the arms.

Mr. Medel was her second host; she had arranged for three different couches, she said, because she wanted to see three different New York

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neighborhoods. “It’s like a cultural study,” she said. On her first night at Mr. Medel’s he took her to a rooftop dinner party at Connie Hum’s. Ms. Hum, who is 26 and works for a management consulting firm, is a New York couch surfing host who lives high above Times Square; after dinner Ms. Hum taught Ms. Montoya how to belly dance.

“When you couch surf,” Ms. Marisol said, “you go straight to the goods.”

Like Servas, the so-called hospitality network that has promoted peace through home stays since World War II, the Couch Surfing Project aims “to bring people together and create intercultural understanding,” said Daniel Hoffer, one of its founders.

Or, as Mark Credland, an electrical engineer living in Toronto whose job requires extensive travel in the United States, explained: “I used to try to meet people in bars and would always end up getting stuck talking to the drunk in the corner.” Couch surfing yields better conversations, he said. (He had tried another travelers’ social networking site called wayn.com, he said, “but I got lots of e-mails from Russian girls wanting to marry me.”)

Mr. Hoffer, 29, who received an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Harvard and an M.B.A. from Columbia, started his first dot-com when he was 15 and now develops new business for Symantec. His main couch surfing co-founder, Casey Larkin Fenton, a 29-year-old programmer and former political consultant, is also a dot-com veteran, schooled in interconnectivity and social values.

Couch surfing was Mr. Fenton’s idea, the seeds of which were planted on a trip to Iceland six years ago. He harvested 1,500 names and e-mail addresses from the University of Iceland’s student directory and sent each a come-on: “Hey, Bjorn, I’m coming to

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what makes them that way?” Mr. Fenton continued, “and who are you?

Because you get to compare and contrast yourself with these other selves every day in your own living room.”

For constant surfers, the couch becomes a new sort of home, redefining, in many ways, their own ideas about what a home really is.

A state of near ceaseless traveling puts the couch surfer in a transnational zone, an idea dear to Pico Iyer, the travel writer and novelist who has been chewing over notions of home and nomadism for 25 years. Mr. Iyer sees the surfers exemplifying a new form of globalism, “one not defined by the plutocrats as meaning foreign goods,” he said, but by the “road” — or couch — where people meet outside the boundaries or categories of their passports or religions.

“Home for folks like the couch surfers has less and less to do with a piece of soil and more to do with the friends and values they carry,” Mr. Iyer said. “I think the beauty of the present century is that more and more folks are defining their home inwardly.”

Couch surfing, he said, “has consecrated the floating planetary home.”

Mark Ellingham, the founder of the Rough Guide travel guides, noted, too, that what couch surfing seems to diminish is the idea of the foreign country as a commodity to be sampled and purchased. “It sounds more empathetic than the old hippie-backpacker thing of seeing what you can get out of a place and moving on,” he said.

“It reminds me of when everyone was hitchhiking, a practice that stopped in the 1990s either because of fear or a new affluence, or both. Hitchhikers were very committed, too. It’s a new idea but an old ethos.”

Jim Stone, who turned 30 last week, has been surfing nonstop for three and a half years. He was the

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99th person to join the Couch Surfing Project, and for many members, their first guest. He had been working in the tax appraiser’s office in Denton, Tex., he said, “and I was alarmed that two years went by so quickly and I hadn’t done anything significant.”

Surfing is hard on romance, he said, but a boon to sleep. “I used to think I was an insomniac,” he said.

“Now I find in new places I sleep like a baby.”

Stone worked odd jobs around the globe for the last four years to finance his travels. Since July, however, he has been working full-time for the Couch Surfing Project, as one of its three paid employees, operating from his laptop, wherever he and it may be. Does that mean he is settling down?

“I like this traveling road show of my friends,” he said, describing what are known in couch surfing circles as collectives, in which 100 or so volunteers, mostly experts in programming, surf a city for a few months while tinkering with the Web site. A collective for Thailand is planned for next year.

“My mom is real happy,” he did admit, “especially now that I have a real job.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Photos courtesy of the New York Times

Iceland.” In a little over 24 hours he had 100 invitations.

“I knew it was how I wanted to travel,” Mr. Fenton said. He has been surfing on and off since 2005, and was surfing Mr. Hoffer’s couch, a long black leather one discovered on craigslist.com, last week. “But I didn’t know if other people would. I thought, I’ll take a chance and see if there are other people like me. And, wow, do they exist.”

Membership, he pointed out, has tripled each year. Each week this month more than 5,000 members have been signing on. Mr. Fenton is working on gaining 501(c)(3) status for the Couch Surfing Project, the holy grail of nonprofits, as he put it, which would make it tax exempt. (The Couch Surfing Project is not a moneymaking venture, though it charges members who would like to be “verified” with an address check. In the United States that service costs $25. As for why the site might qualify as a charity, Mr. Hoffer said, “We have a benevolent mission that we think is better served by a nonprofit corporate structure.”)

“We’ve all worked very hard at our other jobs and we’ve paid the bills,” Mr. Fenton said. “Up till now the site has functioned passively. We want to understand how to do it more efficiently. It’s complex, and its demographics are literally all over the map.”

He said the process of surfing was like the lottery. “Anything can happen: the glamour and the appeal are the stories you hear, the coming of age stories, the travel stories,” he said.

Hosts get to travel without leaving home, through the surfers in their living rooms.

“Who are they and

14 #

Broke buys

the best green travel products Eco-friendly steals and splurges for your next trip

by stirling kelso

There’s no need to pack a converter when you bring USBCell’s AA rechargeable batteries.

The batteries, which can last for years, charge via any USB port (such as those on your laptop). usbcell.com; $20.

Swiss company Sigg has come out with a new line of water bottles emblazoned with playful messages like RISE ABOVE PLASTIC and MAKE LOVE, NOT LANDFILL. sigg.com; $25.

Paperblank’s journals are hand-stitched, pocketsize, and crafted from paper sourced from fast-growing pines. The company also donates 10 percent of its profits to charities such as Doctors Without Borders. paperblanks.com; $12.

Twenty percent of the proceeds from the sale of this limited-edition bike bag by Tumi go to environmental organizations, including Bicycle for a Day, American Forest Global ReLeaf, and Waterkeeper. tumi.com; $100.

15

gfb.com december 2011

Broke books

another year in central europe?

Frances Mayes, author of Under The Tuscan Sun, returns to Italy in her new book by matthew stone

W

hen Tuscany was not enough, Frances Mayes hit the road, traversing across Europe (A Year in the World is just deception) with her husband. Remember when your fifth grade teacher made you write an essay “What I did on my summer vacation”?

So does Frances Mayes. She wrote a four-hundred page summer essay that is alternately glorious and tedious.

Any traveler could fall in love after the preface, an Iyer-esque essay on the essence of travel, of memories and dreams. “The urge to travel feels magnetic. Two of my favorite words are linked: departure time. And travel whets the emotions, turns upside down the memory bank, and the golden coins scatter.” I feel guilty that I can’t write a more positive review of an author with a gift for travel writing, but, by page 200, I tired of “I went here.

Then I went here. Then I went here.”

In her glorious moments, Mayes makes me feel as if I am her co-pilot. I see what she sees, hear what she hears.

But I can only listen to florid descriptive prose for the length of a magazine article, a few thousand words, not for a book of this size. Make no mistake, Frances Mayes paints with a vibrant brush, such as this description of Wales: “The saturated-green air looked aquatic, as though someone just pulled the plug, draining away the watery world leaving swaying meadows, fields, trees, and hills washed and gleaming.”

Yet A Year in the World can seem more like an exercise in expository writing than a cohesive story. “A cart sells pinwheels. All this under fragrant orange trees in the company of the looming church built on the foundations of a mosque. Rather fantastic children’s clothing shops and bridal shops surround the plaza.” Such passages set the scene brilliantly, but there is no action, and the settings blend

together. Sidewalk café becomes sidewalk café. Shoppers walk the streets.

She ducks into a restaurant for a meal.

Her husband compares the coffees of Europe. Repeat.

I created a parlor game out of the book, in which you open up the book to any two-page spread to see if Mayes is either eating, talking about food, or walking. My success rate was over eighty percent, the perfect proof of the tedium. I could have scored bonus points if was walking and eating on

“I feel guilty that I can’t write a more positive review of an author with a gift for travel writing.” the same page. If I had read this in e-book format, I would do a word search to see how many meals she eats, how many glasses of wine she drinks, or how times she walks down European streets.

I underlined passages throughout which elegantly captured the spirit of travel, but this book is best consumed in pieces. Leave it on your bookshelf.

Pick it up and read an elegantly crafted chapter to go with the Rick Steves show you just watched or the vacation you are dreaming of. Then put it back on the shelf, until the next time you wish to savor Mayes’ morsels in bitesized chunks.  Matthew Stone has visited 46 states and 23 countries, and, although he cannot pick a favorite, an account of his adventures can be found at globalpostmark.com.

gfb.com december 2011

k ic u q & y rt i d

book reviews for busy people

Don’t Look Behind You peter allison

A funny read!

««««

Chickens, Mules and Two Old Fools victoria twead

Charming.

«««

Happier Than A Billionaire nadine hays pisani

Insightful and informative.

«««

No Easy Road patsy whyte

No easy read, either.

««««

16

Photo courtesy of nBan Baker/Redux

Questions answered

Gilbert surrounded by souvenirs from her travels.

There are tourists, there are travelers, and then there's Elizabeth Gilbert.

The best-selling writer makes a nice living from turning simple vacations into transformative experiences.

Now, with a new travelogue out, Committed, and an Eat, Pray, Love movie starring Julia Roberts, Gilbert details how to get the most out of any trip—even if you've only got a week. The goal: to become part of a place rather than just pass through.

GFB: How do you break from the tourist mold andimmerse yourself in a destination?

really intensive Italian lessons, but I made four great friends who showed me the “real” Rome.

EG: Stay put. I've certainly done that exuberant, I-just-want-to-seeeverything travel, where it's two days in Bologna, two days in Milan. But those kinds of experiences never made it into Eat, Pray, Love, mostly because I never met anybody. The memories that really stick with me involve making friends. I did that in Rome, where I got to know people over the course of months and really became part of their lives. But you could just as easily spend your week's vacation in one village. It's amazing how quickly you can become integrated if you try.

GFB: How do you document your trips?

GFB: So if you decide to stay put, how do you go about making friends?

EG: In Rome, I just put up a sign in a local Internet café that said, “Native English speaker looking for native Italian speakers for conversational practice.” Not only did I receive free, 17

EG: When I'm traveling, I don't take pictures of scenery; better photographers than me have shot plenty, and you can find that stuff anywhere. I only take pictures of the people I become friends with. Also, I never sit down to write anything unless I have one person in mind to whom I am telling the story. It helps focus the piece. I wrote Committed to my novelist friend Ann Patchett.

GFB: Is it possible to find an exotic escape without flying halfway around the world?

EG: Sure. I've recently become a huge fan of Atlantic City. Step a block from the boardwalk and there are all of these incredible restaurants and stores run by the immigrants who staff the gfb.com december 2011

city. My husband and I live about two hours away, and we visit once a month to buy spices and goat meat from this Pakistani guy. When you're in his shop, you sort of think to yourself, What country am I in? But you're right behind the Trump Taj Mahal.

GFB: And what if you want to go farther for longer?

EG: I went down to Chile for my cousin's wedding last year. In the airport, I struck up a conversation with a couple fromVermont. They were living in Santiago for six months before setting out for the rest of South America. They were teachers with really lousy salaries, but they had been saving money for 10 years. People say they can't afford to travel. But if you circle a date on your calendar and make that your single, greatest priority, I guarantee you that you can.  This article originally appeared in Budget Travel.

STAYCATION, USA

the best deals for fun close to home.

gfb.com november 2011