Spendthrift Shoestring

Hackney Innovation

I love how the resident of this council flat has created her own garden. She's not the only one in the neighborhood utilizing common space for a garden, either. There's a fellow living in an estate across the street growing rows of vegetables.

Hackney Still Life

Better Orwell than Orwellian.

Cosmopolitan London

For eight nights now we've been bedding down in a furnished apartment on the edge of the City of London. Every single day has been enthralling. I know that London will disappoint me in time, that the particular frustrations of this city will someday gather around me claustrophobically, but for now I'm floating from one discovery to the next.

London's superdiversity is undeniable, and it's exciting. This characteristic of London has me thinking about working on a London project that would catalogue all of the city's many international communities and clusters. I've been wondering if in fact every country in the world is represented in London, and in turn if the world's many national and territorial cultures might all be accessible in London in one or another way—via cuisine, cultural celebration, embassy party, exhibition, or some other form.

It turns out that the city's deep cosmopolitanism has inspired a few projects along these lines. I discovered a project called The World in One City, which saw its creators Alex Horne and Owen Powell attempt to interview one London resident from each of the world's 192 UN-recognized countries during 2006 and 2007. They made it to 189, with just three tiny Pacific countries (Marshall Islands, Palau, and Tuvalu) outstanding. Then I discovered another project with the same name, a photographic essay by Philippe Sibelly from 2005 depicting one person from each of the 202 nations competing in the Olympics. (Londoners interested in Sibelly's project are in luck. An exhibition of Sibelly's project will open at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith this coming week.)

I'm thinking about how I might approach the subject of London's remarkable cosmopolitanism while I'm lucky enough to live and work here, what I might be able to add to the material initiated by the two projects above.

Leaving New York: Checklist & Philosophy

I moved to New York in 2003. When I moved here I knew I wanted to be a travel writer and editor but I had no idea how to will this dream career into existence. Over the last seven years in New York, I’ve emailed hundreds of editors, made countless phone calls, written innumerable drafts, discovered blogging, identified my budget-friendly shtick, and in turn decided that said shtick didn’t have to define my entire oeuvre. My professional shift has happened while I've lived in New York, and in many instances it's developed as it has because I've lived in New York.

In December I’ll leave New York for London for an indefinite period of time. I assume that I’ll return at some point, but I don’t know if and when I’ll do so. I’m very excited about the move and all of the professional and social opportunities it will open up for me, but I’ve also begun to feel the tug of emotion and advance nostalgia that comes with taking leave.

My solution? Urban exploration, with the goal of continuing to interrupt the everydayness of life in this glorious metropolis by tracking down various captivating corners and zones.

For about a year now I’ve been steadily making local excursions to various parks, neighborhoods, restaurants, bars, cafes, and landmarks in and around New York. I wrote a little blog post on these adventures last September, which I tried to frame as a reconsideration of the terribly maligned concept of the staycation. Now, with my leave-taking more or less scheduled, making sure that I get to the remaining sites and experiences on the list is a project of greater urgency.

I have about a dozen items left on my list at this point. Bars with fancy cocktails—a surprising number of which are located in hotels—are a priority, as are a few standard tourist sites that I’ve never visited, like the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. I’ve got a few beaches (Fire Island and Riis Beach) on the list, a few cafes, some museums, some bridge walks, and rides to the northern termini of the 1 and 2 subway lines, among other items.

My primary companion in urban exploration over the past year and a bit is my friend Rob, who I hope will visit me in London at some point to apply our urban exploration habit to another glorious metropolis.

The Staycation Reconsidered

People in the travel industry don't much like the idea of the staycation, a concept seemingly perfectly tailored to a recession. Much of the opposition within the industry to the idea of the staycation seems to reside in the idea that the more people stay at home the less money they spend on transportation, hotels, restaurants, and other touristy things, with all sorts of pernicious and negative knock-on effects for tourism writ large.

Honestly, it's not completely clear to me why traveling types are so opposed to the staycation. As far as the economic argument goes, people can spend lots of money enjoying themselves at home, on precisely the sorts of things for which tourists shell out cash—including hotels. This past weekend I got into a conversation with two New Yorkers who, like me, have been sorely tempted to book a night at the Standard, the hotel that straddles the High Line. The Standard is merely the most obvious current choice for a local hotel bed hop, but it's not the only one. I'm currently updating hotel listings for EuroCheapo's New York guide and I've already come across three hotels where I'd happily shack up for a night.

Hotels aside, there are plenty of ways that staycations can generate tourist dollars. If everyone in New York City with budgeted travel funds took a week off at home and put, say, half of their vacation budgets toward local restaurants, activities, and other amusements, that would surely amount to an enormous sum.

To be honest, I kind of like the concept of a staycation, if the point of the staycation is to find a way to explore one's hometown or backyard in new or previously undiscovered ways. Last summer, when I had eight weeks to romp around London—well, six, once my jaunts around the UK and beyond were taken into account—I assembled a long list of things to do and see. My list was varied. It included neighborhoods, parks, restaurants, walks, cafés, bars, and various products. This list made my time in London a blur of excitement. It felt as if I was unpeeling a different layer of London almost every day.

I loved this way of experiencing a city, and when I returned I decided to find a way to replicate the process here at home. It's helped that my friend Rob and I have settled over the past few months into a pattern of taking little exploratory adventures around the city. These excursions have cemented my commitment to re-exploring New York, but at a certain point I realized that I needed to write a New York list in the spirit of my London activity list. As it now stands, my New York list is a running tabulation of hometown places and activities I haven't yet experienced: various hotel bars for fancy cocktails; a Bosnian hamburger joint; Wave Hill Park; a ride to the end of the 1 subway line; highly recommended tattoo parlors, and so on.

Does a staycation along these lines trump the sheer joy of engaging with different cultures, languages, and customs? Of course not. But if a hometown's richness and variability can be revealed in countless new ways through a staycation, I say book your trip tonight.

Budget Travel Online: London Hotel Tips

Check out my tips for nabbing cheap hotel rooms in London on Budget Travel online, posted yesterday.

London: My EuroCheapo Tips

Meredith Franco at EuroCheapo wrote a lovely blog post today detailing some of my London tips and suggestions. Thanks for the mention, Meredith!

Those headed to London should be sure to check out EuroCheapo's London guide.

Weekend: Iceland, More Cartagena, Cheap Caribbean, London Embassies, Alesha Dixon

Sarah Lyall's piece on Iceland in the New York Times yesterday documents the fall-out from Iceland's spectacular financial crash. It quotes an Icelandic woman named Hronn Helgadottir who points out that she can no longer afford to travel. She describes a recent trip to Amsterdam, purchased before the krona's collapse, during which she and her husband kept a very tight budget. From the article:

They ate as cheaply as they could and bought nothing. “It was strange to stand in a store and look at a bag or a pair of shoes and see that they cost 100,000 kronur, when last year they cost only 40,000,” she said.

What's remarkable about this description is how it matches my own experience as a visitor to Ms. Helgadottir's Iceland. On both of my visits (in 2001 and again in 2004) the general cost index was terrifying. I ate enormous hotel breakfasts in order to stave off hunger until the afternoon and kept to an extremely parsimonious budget. Hot dogs and supermarket items saved me. I harbor no Schadenfreude in sharing this—it's ironic, in other words, but not funny.

Elsewhere in the Times: a feature on dining in Cartagena by Danielle Pergament—there's that increased attention to Colombia again!—and a round-up of Caribbean hotels and venues by Austin Considine. The latter is weak on affordable hotels, though two shine through: Sea Cliff Cottages in Dominica (from $90 in high season) and Virgin Islands Campground on Water Island in the U.S. Virgin Islands (from $75 in high season).

The FT online carried an interesting piece by Rob Blackburn on Friday on the ambassadors at small embassies in London. It profiles the missions of Andorra, Eritrea, Fiji, Malawi, and Montenegro. The most surprising revelation within is that Andorrans apparently need visas to study and work in the UK.

Lastly, I'm happy to see that a song by Alesha Dixon, one of my favorite gossip column fixtures from this past summer in London, has entered the UK top ten. "The Boy Does Nothing" is at Number Eight this week. Bubblegum fun.

Weekend over and out.

EuroCheapo London City Guide Update

One of my projects this past summer was an update of EuroCheapo's London city guide. The guide is now up and running. It's exciting to be able to peruse my reviews along with those written by others within the expert hotel reviewing EuroCheapo cohort. I also have to admit that I'm proud of my city guide articles. Sue me.

Given the increasingly doable rate of the US dollar against the pound—$1.74 buys you a pound right now, against the terrifying $2-for-£1 exchange rate in play at various points this past summer—I'm hoping the EC London guide will get tons of visitors over the autumn and winter.

Thanks for the gig, EuroCheapo!

Three Departure Boards

Belgrade. May 2008.

Frankfurt. September 2008. (Better Frankfurt departure board image here.)

London Stansted. May 2008.