witoldc

I know people in this situation. They pretend to travel poor as a gimmick to make it sound more awesome in their stories.

The people I know did not get an allowance, per se. It's more that they had 100% guaranteed security. If they got busted for Ecstasy in Thailand, mom and dad would insta-ship 3 grand or whatever it takes to get out of jail. And when they eventually come back home with $0 in their pockets, they're not living on the street. The parents take care of whatever they need; housing, transportation, job connections, etc.

Actually, I can tell you how they do it - and why I can't.

For accommodations, they stay mostly in really dumpy places. 110 degrees outside, but they have no air conditioning in their sweat box, roaches and bugs in the rooms, or share some 10 year old hostel mattress with 5 other people in the room. In fact, you see backpackers set up tents in the middle of the city streets like homeless people in places like Chiang Mai because they want to save that $5-10 for something else. There's a reason why they always post pics from a nice beach, but almost never from the place they stayed.

For food, they eat street food or they cook cheap things in the hostel like pasta. Admiringly, in a big chunk of Asia eating streetfood is not a drawback. It's often amazing and quite sufficient. But in rest of the world it's not that easy. As a foodie, I couldn't just cook pasta and sauce to save money when I'm in Spain or whatever.

And for entertainment, they hang out with other hostelers, buy cheap beer at 7-11 to pre-game and do cheap things as entertainment; walk around the city, see some monuments, maybe go to the local movie theater for $2-3, browse the web (a shit ton; backpacker internet cafes seem to be one of the most popular businesses in backpacker neighborhoods.)

The stuff above is not free, obviously. But if you saved up $5000 before the trip, it can last you a very long time depending on how cheap you go. Heck... it you live in a tent most nights or find some cheap $3/night bed, you can easily exist for $5/day. Emphasis on exist. And yes, I've seen plenty of such people on the road.

In summary, this was one of my bigger travel revelations that makes me sad. I can't live like that. I don't want to. Staying in dumps and not trying foods and activities to save money is torture to me. I'm not even going to mention how much motorcycle rental/own costs in most places around the world. But staying in a budget - but pleasant place - is usually not that cheap. And many temptations can be pretty expensive. Moonlit admission to Victoria Falls? That's $50. Want to see the gorillas in Rwanda? That's $750 just for the permit. Am I going to go to Thailand and not see a few real -quality- Muay Thai fights at real venues? That's a good $50/pop and I would be embarrassed to go to tourist places where they have fake fights for free for tourists (usually near bars.) And so on. When you have all day free and don't just want to sit around all day, things add up quickly even if they are cheap. That's if you want to do more than just exist somewhere.

Actually, I picked up on this as well. Most of these people are... individualists... (which I also consider myself.) But many go further than that. They just become self-centered. They ask you where you're going only so they can tell you that they've been there, and done it better. (And if they haven't, they just lose interest and drop the subject to something else that puts the focus on them.)

And I was shocked the first time - of many - that the Israelis on their pot vacation tricked me into buying them stuff. They probably think they're smart travelers and street-smart when they abuse other people's generosity and weasel into something for free.

So... how much?

In recent years, I read a few articles claiming that it's not the Americans that lost British accents, but that the British used to speak similarly to the way Americans do and somewhere along the way it became fashionable in Britain to talk with what we today recognize as British accents.

However, when I tried to work backwards to find the source of this claim, I could only find 1 book written by a linguist.

Is there any shred of truth to this?