My Year In Cities, 2009

I'm going to round up 2009 the best way I know how: by travel. So taking a page from the playbooks of TheVole and Kottke, here (chronologically) is My Year In Cities, 2009.

• Toledo, OH*
• Chicago, IL*
• New York, NY (also Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island)*
• Jersey City, NJ*
• Hoboken, NJ*
• Philadelphia, PA
• Boston, MA*
• Hong Kong, SAR*
• Macau, SAR
• Atlantic City, NJ*
• Detroit, MI*
• Baltimore, MD
• Berlin, Germany
• Los Angeles, CA
• Milwaukee, WI
• Grand Rapids, OH
• Saint Lucia, West Indies
• Worcester, MA

* Denotes multiple trips throughout the year.

For 2010, I'm definitely scooping up London, Bruges, Edinburgh, Reykjavik, Las Vegas and possibly Dubai, Oslo, Stockholm.

How To Fly For Less Than The Cost Of A Flight

I've been a naughty blogger. I went to Berlin. I had a great time, stayed slightly within my means, and left this blog hanging while I funneled the content into Jaunted.

If you'd like to see what went exactly went down overseas, some of it is here, but now I'd like to tie up the loose ends of my last post by dissecting exactly how I managed to go to Berlin without bankrupting myself. It became a three-step process, one that I highly recommend

for those who can do it. Shall we begin?

1. Flexibility. Since my employment is somewhat fluid, I was able to utilize that magical travel booking engine feature of searching +/- 3 days. After posting my last, emotional entry on trouble with such sites, the heavens opened and I stumbled across my dream $381 roundtrip direct (including taxes and fees) on Delta from JFK to TXL.
   I booked the shit out of that, even though they barely had a seat for me on the plane and it was, in the simplest way I can put it, a shit flight.
2. Humility. Look, in the immortal words of Sheryl Crow: "This ain't no disco; this ain't no country club either." This is a last-minute trip on less than a shoestring budget. I booked this baby 4 days prior to departure, and whipped out a Priceline voucher code for $50 off a name-your-own-price hotel stay, a deal I magically got on Twitter.
   
   Since I was due to meet up with my guy-friend for the last 3 nights of my stay, I opted to name my own price for a 5-star hotel in the Tiergarten district, which returned with the Marriott Berlin. That added another $150 onto my trip total. The humility enters the picture for the first two nights, when I bit the bullet and shacked up at Jetpak Hostel, which boasted of Free WiFi and rented me a bike for a whole day for 5 Euro.
   
   It was on this bike and at Jetpak that I was able to quickly get a feel for the city, while befriending the amazing Miriam, one of the hostel staff who has now also taken up travel blogging on an Italian site. The hostel was about another $35, but factor in a few more dollars for all the 1 Euro cappuccinos I consumed while happily working the mornings away in their cafe.
3. Localizing: Sure I wanted to shop, and have a nice meal at a fancy al fresco restaurant, and take a side trip, but that's because those are the urges one has when exploring a new destination. You wouldn't be doing those things if you actually lived in Berlin, and so I thought--what would I be doing tonight if I lived here?
   
   Eating 3 Euro currywurst from a corner Imbiß and chasing it with 75 Eurocent beers in bed while watching Bernd, das Brot. Or taking a free stroll through the Tiergarten to the Siegessäule. Or recycling--an action made so much cooler when a barcode-reading, bottle-eating machine is involved.
   
   At the end of the trip, I realized that I had only shopped for one thing: a 3 Euro magazine on modern European Architecture from Pro QM.

All in, I'm looking back at a 5-night/6-day trip to Berlin that cost about $600 total. Damn, I'm cheap (and good). Considering that flights for the same route--when searching around the web--were averaging $800, I think this trip was a flippin success. Not to mention how cozy it was that my tax refund arrived prior to this. I won't be getting one of those next year, so I better travel the heck out of this year; am I right?

Cynthia, travel dork: 2* Economic downturn and lack of sustainable income: 0

(2 because I traveled to Hong Kong in February using these 3 steps)

Straight Trippin: To Berlin Or Not To Berlin

Since last post, I have hopped down to Atlantic City, steeped for a week in the Midwest, and bolted to Baltimore--all the while cycling memories of Hong Kong in my head like Viewmaster slides. Not to mention the fact that I have taken on more responsa-blog-bility. 

And again I am off...or so I hope, if I win my battle with booking websites. There is simply nothing more frustrating than to watch airfares drop, form a cozy budget in your head, find fares that match or undercut it, and then have those fares disappear or return with "sold out" just before confirmation. Am I perhaps getting what I deserve for snagging that bargain-basement Cathay direct to HKG earlier this year?

My tendency to follow fares, like a broker eagerly watching a stock ticker, both causes and solves many problems. Currently, the mercurial nature of travel sites flaunting Memorial Day pricing is driving me to drink (Red Bull for the first time in many years, even though I was handed it on the street). 

To the point: Am I or am I not flying to Berlin in exactly a week? Having already covered nearly 80% of southern Germany, it's about time I pay attention to what lurks north of Frankfurt; I hear they even have German food up there! (ha)

On one hand, if I go, I drop down into that pit of "perhaps I can pawn this," from which I have just recovered after HK. This is the only downside, for the rewards of risking quality of life for time abroad are too many to count, but here are a few: soaking in the city, its architecture, street art, design, food, new German phrases, the style of the locals and how they go about mundane activities like ordering a cut of meat from the butcher. 

These are the details I absorb, to the end that I can easily chameleon into them and make of Berlin another home port--another stepping stone in my global garden, if you will. 

Is it not extremely fulfilling to learn how to use and navigate another city's public transportation? How could one not relish pronouncing a new word, and not just saying it, but saying it correctly and knowing its meaning and usage, and knowing that you'll now always remember it. That even 40 years from now, you'll be sitting down to a bowl of minestrone in your kitchen and suddenly a word like "Überraschung" comes to your lips, and you smirk with the dusty memory it elicits, of buying Kinder eggs at FRA and wondering what's inside and then never finding out becase you will give them all away back in the States. And you're old, and eating unremarkable soup in your average kitchen, but no--for a moment you are back in the airport and remembering the sweet anxiety that comes with powerwalking to your gate for a transatlantic. 

I digress. 

As for Berlin, it is now a matter of cost versus culture, and as always I'm choosing culture. And beer.

[Photo via Flickr]