#shoestrung travel advice

In general

• This is terrible advice, but especially for short trips, remember: you don’t have to be healthy, you just shouldn’t be hungry.
• Cook for yourself. Make sure your accommodation has a kitchen you can use. You’ll save so much money.
• Pasta and rice are very cheap, very filling, and travel well. Both can be fancied up with whatever sauces or vegetables you can afford. Canned beans are cheap, good protein.
  
• For food during the day, or if you’re staying somewhere you can’t cook, bread is easy to find in corner stores, very inexpensive, often vegan, and goes well with just about everything (cheese or sausage and a bottle of wine is a proper picnic). Try to buy small baguettes; large ones go stale before you can finish them. Cereal bars are also filling and easy to travel with.
• Apples and bananas travel well, last a while, and can be taken anywhere. You’ll see a lot of small fruit stores open in the early morning. In the spring, at least in Athens and Lisbon, you can find strawberry vendors selling the bruised strawberries for €1/kilo.
• Tap water is almost always safe to drink in Europe. In several cities, there are public drinking fountains in the streets that draw on the fresh springs below the city. Rome in particular has a lot of these. Put your finger over the mouth of the spigot to make it come out the small hole on the top like a drinking fountain.
  
• Many couchsurfing hosts will feed you at least one meal, although they’re not in any way obligated to.
  
• Many hostels have a free food bin full of things previous residents have left behind. You can find a lot of pasta and rice, usually some condiments and spices, and often treats like cookies. Some hostels also offer free breakfasts or evening snacks. If you can, hoard that shit. It literally kept me alive the week I went to Ireland and forgot to bring any money with me.
  
• If you’re vegetarian or vegan, cooking for yourself is going to be the easiest way to make sure everything you’re eating is safe. Most food packaging in Europe bolds the ingredients that could be allergens, such as milk and eggs, making it easy to scan for things you can’t eat even with the language barriers.

Eating Out

• Even if you can’t afford it often, try the local food wherever you go. It’s such a huge part of every culture. For the widest spread of traditional foods, I’d recommend that at the very least you try a street food, a pastry, and a drink. Sweet or savory, snack or meal, coffee or tea or alcohol: doesn’t matter. Do some research and figure out what seems worth the money.
• If you want a proper restaurant experience, many restaurants in the center offer fixed-price menus. For €10-20, you pick an appetizer, an entrée, and a dessert from about half a dozen options each, and enjoy a pretty fancy, decent-quality meal for not too much money.
• It can be difficult to find restaurants that are specifically vegan or vegetarian, but in many countries there are vegan or vegetarian options available. In Italy, for example, you can order pizza marinara, which is pizza without cheese: just flatbread and tomato sauce and whatever other toppings you want. With a bit of research you should be able to figure out some options to look for in most cities.
• In many countries, sitting down at a restaurant or café costs twice what it would if you got your food or drink to go, or ate at the counter.