Will You Stay Frugal Post-Pandemic? I Was the NYT’s Frugal Traveler, So I Have Some Idea
The one big thing that guarantees whether your new habits—from bread-baking to windowsill scallions—will survive the apocalypse.
In July of 2006, I wound up in Tirana, the capital of Albania. This was a few weeks into my tenure as the Frugal Traveler columnist for the New York Times, which kicked off with a summer-long trip around the world—an attempt to have an amazing, relatively comfortable adventure on a fairly low budget.
Tirana, I remember, was fun (I met a group of young filmmakers!), weird (streets filled with Mercedes-Benzes and… horse carts?), and hot. Really hot. Specifically, I remember one early afternoon when I wound up walking back and forth across central Skanderbeg Square, searching the streets nearby for… God, what was I even hunting that day? A museum? An art gallery? A shop of some kind? All I remember was that it was hot as hell, and that I could’ve waited out the day in cafe, or hailed a taxi, or even figured out the bus system, and saved myself a ton of misery. Instead, dedicated to saving a few lek, I walked and sweated and cursed and sweated some more.
Ever since, I’ve thought of myself as “the kind of guy who’ll walk back and forth across Tirana in the midday summer heat, just to save a buck.” But the fact is, in recent…
