http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/09/travel/budget-friendly-seattle-from-meals-to-massages.html 2014-09-15 23:02:08 Budget-Friendly Seattle, From Meals to Massages The Frugal Traveler joins two friends from high school for a low-cost mini-reunion in the Emerald City. === My friend Doug and I approached the ticket counter at the It was a frugal experiment: I had long wondered what would happen if customers showing no outward signs of financial hardship took advantage of the pay-what-you-can policy at museums around the country. But we really did it to embarrass our friend Jon, who has far more of a social conscience than we do and never saw a street performer or lemonade stand to which he did not donate extravagantly. We had planned it secretly, down to surreptitiously asking our waiter at lunch to change a nickel for five pennies. He was, predictably, appalled. “Are you guys kidding?” Jon said. “You’re really paying 1 cent?” He then apologized to the man, paying for his own admission and tacking on an additional $5 for each of us. I would later leave $10 in the donation box, too — the museum’s collection of Native American artists alone is worth it. But the experiment showed that travelers on budgets even lower than ours can pay very little and not be humiliated. I stopped in Seattle during a trip through the Pacific Northwest, meeting up with two of my favorite travel companions, my high school classmates Jon (who flew in from Boston) and Doug (who hopped up from Santa Cruz, Calif.), making it a bit of a male-centric mini-reunion. I had proposed to keep our budget low by spending as close to nothing as possible by day — eating breakfast in the hostel, choosing cheap or free activities and not eating lunch until Seattle’s ubiquitous afternoon happy hours, which often feature sharply discounted food, started opening up at 3 p.m. — and loosening up, at least a bit, in the evenings. Lodging turned out to be our biggest challenge: When we began planning in July, all reasonably priced hotels anywhere near the city center had been booked. Then we found Frugal activities, on the other hand, were plentiful. We started with Jake Schlack’s energetic Seattle 101 tour, which is given daily through Jake led us from one tourist spot to another — Pike Place Market to historic Pioneer Square and down to the waterfront — but wowed us by pointing out that many of Seattle’s manhole covers are in maps of downtown that show your current location, like Google Maps in cast iron. He also peppered the tour with tidbits you couldn’t see, like Seattle’s underground city (the level of 19th-century streets and storefronts buried when the city was raised 12 feet), and noted that the city would never be what it was today if it hadn’t served as the prime staging ground for fortune seekers during the Klondike Gold Rush. (The The tour ended outside We headed straight for the brewery tour, given by Abil Bradshaw, a nutritionist, performance artist and one of the more pro-beer people you’ll meet. Beer, she reminded us, was once the safest way to hydrate. “Water has always given us a really hard time,” she said, referring to diseases and gastric distress. Beer was “a hydrating beverage that didn’t kill us in a week. We are here because of beer, and that is no exaggeration.” As we walked through the brewery, she took us through the science of brewing, including what helps make amber ale amber (caramelized sugar) and what hops can add to I.P.A.s. Appropriately, it was time to hit up those happy hours. We started classy at On one of the three days, I broke our happy hour rule to drag Doug and Jon on the light rail out to Tukwila (one stop short of the airport) in search of a Somali restaurant called The restaurant setup was simple — a cross between informal diner and a basement social club — and so was the menu. We ordered three dishes: barbecued chicken, bone-in goat meat, and chicken suqaar, small pieces of sautéed chicken flavored with a complex spice mixture, vegetables and onions. All three cost $9.99 and came on platters with vegetables and rice or wafer-thin, buttery chapati. The chicken was by far the best — with just barely charred meat pulled off the bone in what tasted like a pretty American barbecue sauce. There were also, of course, bananas. I say “of course” for the benefit of my Somali readers, who know what we did not: that bananas accompany many Somali meals. Our waiter, in fact, brought them before our main dishes, like a breadbasket. The food was not award-winning, but our waiter and fellow customers were nice; it was certainly worth the experience. (The sparse online reviews note that there is a family room for those not comfortable eating with the typically all-male crowd.) “Considering the odds I’ll ever get to Somalia are almost nil, I thought it was great,” Doug said. “I’ll never look at a banana the same way again,” Jon added. We made our way to The Far East theme extended into the evening, which we planned to spend in Seattle’s International District, home to several Asian communities. It started with a dirt cheap dinner at Then it was on to (respectable) massages at Imperial Massage, where a female friend had recommended the 60-minute foot and body massage for $29 — about the best price you’ll find this side of the Pacific. Entering the mostly empty As I left Doug and Jon in Seattle, where they would stay a few more days freed from my budget constraints, I considered what would happen if I went back in time to 1988 to tell our high school selves about our visit together. “Would you believe that in 2014, you three will meet in Seattle, stay in a youth hostel, swill beer in a fast-food parking lot, pay a penny to enter a museum, stuff yourselves at a bargain dumpling place and get a cheap massage?” I’m pretty sure our response would have been: “Sounds about right.”