salmo99 said,

"What you are proposing is no different from illegal aliens coming to the US and pimping us for food and medical care."

this is absolutey not true. taxes pay for food and health programs in america. taxes do not pay for soup kitchens. soup kitchens(as far as i know) are funded by charities, such as local churches or rotary clubs. charity =/= social welfare.

abusing a private charity is a different issue than taking advantage of government social welfare programs.

quote:

What you are proposing is no different from illegal aliens coming to the US and pimping us for food and medical care.

I suggest that you visit the bread lines in San Francisco and look hard for some of them "illegal aliens". You won't find any illegal aliens "pimping us for food and medical care" at all. All are native-born Americans in that line, and at the County Hospital.

Somebody has fed you an incorrect meme.
Don't perpetuate an incorrect stereotype.

OK, mea culpa-the comment about illegal aliens was off track (even I did not like the way it came of on review). But my primary point remains: if you can afford to travel to Europe, you should have your act together enough not to have to rely upon charity or social welfare.

Could be an interesting place to meet people.... I wouldn't be opposed to trying it once. Even if you did it regularly, I would say maybe ask to help out in the kitchen or doing dishes or something like that...
MB

Ok, I had a few reasons for posting the soup kitchen idea: 1. the true "vagabonds" i know simply travel whether they have money or not, even at the risk of becoming homeless. These are people who drop out of society and loose everythign but their ability to travel, whether its on foot or they work on a ship so that they gat to the next continent. 2. if travel is a luxury for you then I think you need to reevaluate and being at a soup kitchen might help. 3. When talking about Western Europe (not India, SE Asia, Latin America, Africa or the ex Soviet Union) poverty is not about starving. The only people starving here have eating disorders. We do have poverty, but due to our fairly good safety net (social assistance organised by the state) poverty may be characterised more by isolation, lack of prospects and possibly homelessness - but thank God not starvation. So I can feel pretty confident recommending soup kitchens without having to worry that you will be taking food from the mouth of someone who desperately needs it. There's - simply put - enough to go around. For social workers here soup kitchens serve primarily as an opportunity to come into contact with people who need other types of help (homes, detox, etc). 4. Last but not least, I think it would be great if people who are travelling actually plan for experiences beyond the tourist thing and end up seeing society in other countries just as 3D as you do at home. The Louvre might be enough for your grandmother, but if you call yourself a vagabond, you ought to meet the people who panhandle outside the Louvre too.

salmo said,

"But my primary point remains: if you can afford to travel to Europe, you should have your act together enough not to have to rely upon charity or social welfare."

this is not correct.

perhaps relying on charity is the only way you CAN afford to travel to europe.

even for someone such as myself who could buy food if i needed to, why should i if i'm offered a meal? just because i have something to trade with doesnt mean i have to trade with it to get what i can get for free.

i have been in many situations where someone has offered me a meal and i accepted, but only after telling the person i had the ability to pay for it myself. i value saving the money i would spend on a meal and getting a charity meal more than i value spending my money to buy myself a meal. therefore, my action in accepting the meal is moral. (exchanging something of lower value for something of higher value)

the difference between this situation and a soup kitchen situation is is that often people think that soup kitchens only want to serve people who "need" the meal. so you may be accepting a meal under a false pretense if you just walk in and get one. well an easy way to solve this dilemna is to simply ask someone working there if they would mind serving someone who doesnt exactly "need" the meal. just tell them your deal and see what they say. i doubt anyone would say, "no, sorry, go away." generally, people working in soup kitchens are nice and helpful. maybe you could even meet a person to talk with or hang out with for a while.

as i said before, theres not any harm in asking someone something.

-andrew

As said before, there are three things that cost money.
Transportation, a place to sleep and food.
As I see it, all three of them can be acquired in several ways. The easiest and in my view the most fun is to hitchhike, aks (or better get offered) a place to stay and food. This happens, mostly you get it from not poor people. If you do happen to get into a poor home, you would save enough this way to pay for the arrangements.
There is also the independend way. As mentioned in the opening post this would probably be biking and taking a tent camping anywhere. For food just go to a supermarket, they still buy way too much and throw out the perfectly well food. You can either ask for that food (which is not very independend) or just take it after they threw it out. If its still wrapped there is no problem. You can even do this at home and its good for the environment also.

I do prefer the first way. Ask for everything in a nice way. Make sure to never get too much from one person. Ask for reasonable things. Getting a place to stay doesnt cost anybody anything, same as hitching a ride. Getting one free meal from somebody is not going to make him broke, never.

Did mboyd ever go on his trip? I would be interested to hear how it worked out.

This is the first time I have read this thread, and the attitude of taking and not giving back (even if offered) and standing in soup lines when you can afford a meal kind of makes me ill and isn't, to me at least, in the spirit of a traveler. Yes, you can take a meal or overnight stay if offered, but as salmo's posts point out, there is a fine line between being gracious and freeloading. And some of what is described here is freeloading.

Well said, no body likes a mooch.

Doesn't look like he has posted lately.

Do you all think it would be okay to travel in Europe cheaply by couchsurfing and hitchiking as much as possible, buying food from supermarkets? Unless I was actually starving, I do not like the idea of taking from soup kitchens, either, though as someone suggested if you could work for the food it would be good. I would return the favor by letting people stay with me after traveling when I'm able, and in Europe I don't think I'd be taking from people who can't afford it...But I am still in early planning stages, I just don't know how much money I'll have--but I want to travel anyway! But I don't want to mooch off of people; just stay/travel with people who offer...

quote:

Do you all think it would be okay to travel in Europe cheaply by couchsurfing and hitchiking as much as possible, buying food from supermarkets?

No.

No is a bit of an overly simple answer. You can certainly use those methods to cut down on your costs - supermarket food is actually pretty cheap in Europe, to the point where I've had comments from Western European travellers in Canada complaining about how much food costs. But $5 per day isn't happening...even at a grocery store, $5 wouldn't get you much more than a decent breakfast. And really...are you going on holiday just to stretch it as long as possible, or are you going to enjoy yourself?

$50 per day might be more reasonable in Western Europe, still cheap by European standards (I usually figure on $100 per day in western europe) and you could probably scrape by on less if you don't ever eat out, don't ever travel by train, and don't visit any of the tourist attractions with admission fees.

Or just stick to eastern countries where the prices haven't caught up yet. Even with my fairly comfortable travelling style, I was only spending a little over $40 per day in Bulgaria, so someone who was on a tight budget could have probably gone for $25 or so.

quote:

No is a bit of an overly simple answer.

Succinct though. You gotta give me that.

This is one of the silliest threads on BnA. (And I say this as a frequent participant in the "Who's Afraid of Anniebanannie" thread. That's how silly this is.)

Sure, you can live (which is to say "survive") in Europe on $5 a day. Refugees and homegrown hobos do it all the time. You will need to steal, cheat, lie, beg for change, rummage through garbage, fight off others, misrepresent yourself, and do a hundred other things you hadn't previously found morally comfortable. Short of that you will have to either a.) find a full time job there, or b.) find a job in your own country until you have enough money to travel there. Otherwise, the only thing you'll get out of Europe is how best to survive as a hobo.

Perhaps the above notion intrigues you. If so, I want you to ask yourself a fundamental question: how is playing the role of hapless, middle-class hobo in Europe any more or less romantic than doing the same in the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, or the UK? What's the benefit? What's the point?