TRAVELING CHEAP
After a rocky start I have finally, after a week, found a way to feed myself in Essaouira and it is a pattern that I have been developing as I travel this year and hope to keep following as I travel this next year.
There are three major costs in my way of traveling.
Travel Costs. The first is the cost of the air ticket. And my solution has been Scott‘s Cheap Flights. I have to stay completely open and to go when and where a cheap ticket is offered. I need to have a wide range of places where I would like to go and a sense of how often I would like to go and then go with what comes up. Unfortunately, the United States is separated by wide oceans from the rest of the world which makes travel to everywhere except Mexico, the Caribbean and central America quite expensive. If I lived in Europe, Ryan Air or another low cost airline, or travel by train, would make travel to a wide range of European and North African countries quite cheap.
Lodging. But I‘ve discovered that my largest cost for a month abroad is lodging. Here I have come to rely on Airbnb. And because the monthly stay is often much less per day than shorter stays, both because Airbnb usually gives a large discount on the apartment and because the cleaning and service fees are spread over a long period and because a month in one place is much cheaper than a month of travel to a number of places, I book an Airbnb for a month. A month is a long enough time to get to know a place and a short enough time that if you are unsatisfied for some reason you will soon be going home. Of course, the most effective way to bring down lodging costs is to exchange houses with someone for a month including exchanging cars. I haven‘t done that yet.
Unfortunately, even for Europeans with their lower travel costs, European Airbnb‘s are much more expensive than Airbnb‘s in other parts of the world, pretty much negating the lower travel costs. Essouira and Greece have been much cheaper for a month than Paris or Germany were. But Essouira costs more to fly to than Paris.
Food. The third big expense if you are not trying to fit in expensive entertainment or expensive day trips is food. The solution here probably depends on the cost of living of the country. The cost of living in Germany and Paris and London is high so it pays to at least eat breakfast at the Airbnb and to cook at least one grocery store meal a day. In Paris and Germany there were grocery stores close by so it was easy to prepare packaged meals or to prepare a simple meal. But as I learned the hard way here in Essaouira the selection was narrow and the Hot Dogs and onion rings that I bought tasted terrible. In Essouira, if I eat grocery store breakfast of dry cereal, orange juice and coffee at my Airbnb, the key to eating cheaply for the other one or two meals is finding where people who live locally eat cheaply. Often it is something local people enjoy eating that is inexpensive. What I have discovered in Essaouira is that the very common evening snack food is a bowl of bean soup, tasting the same everywhere, and a crepe with honey (or a sweet syrup) spread on it that cost 50 cents apiece so dinner can be $1. One step up from this are Snack Chamalo where a tangine, clay bowl of well spiced vegetables and a meat are absolutely delicious for $3 or at Superbe Pastilla where a pastilla, a pastry crusted mixture of spiced chopped vegetables and a meat is $4. The chicken pastilla was a little dry, but the pigeon pastilla was moist and absolutely delicious. The places where each of these dishes were made was a hole in the wall. Snack Chamalo in the worst part of town looked like a run down snack bar with tables, while Superbe Pastilla, had only one two foot table on the street and a single chair so I took the food home. The same is true in India, highway restaurants in grungy areas can have delicious food at a very low price.
In Greece the lowest cost restaurants served Turkish kebabs and pitas at ordinary outside tables. Also inexpensive was a place on the highway out of the tourist section of town where natives of Naoussa, Greece, would stop and pick up ready cooked take home food. I did, too, and heated it in my Airbnb.
A step up from these low priced ways of eating in both Naoussa and Essouira are beautiful restaurants with candles on the table and a large menu that at $10 to $15 are expensive by local standards but relatively cheap by American standards so you feel well served but you are not breaking the bank.
Two rabbit pastillas, each a third of the size of the $4.00 pigeon pastilla at Superbe Pastilla cost $9.00 at the very beautiful Nomade Restaurant, served on a wooden plate splashed with artful designs, still not exorbitant, but half as filling and twice the cost. Naoussa had marvelous outdoor restaurants by the harbor that also didn‘t seem exorbitant to an American.
So what I am trying to get around to is that in each country there are ways that you can eat well and radically cut your eating costs, depending on the country. The key is to eat low cost meals in very ordinary looking restaurants or buy carry out food or cook many of the meals yourself.
On a tight budget in Asheville for a month I would recommend what I already do. Grocery store breakfast. For other meals Trader Joe has endless delicious low cost international meals that can be heated in a microwave for about $4 apiece. There are also in Asheville places which sell delicious precooked meals that need only to be heated up such as Little Sprouts where you can get a meal for two for $8. And the American equivalent of the run down highway restaurants in India or Morocco or Greece in Asheville are Taco Temple or Burger King or my favorite, Bojangles. And of course in Asheville, too, there are many pleasant restaurants where you can eat from $15 on up.
POSTSCRIPT
L’Atelier restaurant where I am now has a cooking school, a boutique shop and this cafe where they serve waffles with fruit on top ($1) and mixed fresh fruit drinks ($2). It is also has fast wifi, which my Airbnb doesn’t have and is a wonderful place to sit and type.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 