The Turk Who Loved Apples Read Online Free PDF Page A

boutique hotels in Puerto Rico and little-known bed-and-breakfasts in far-flung corners of New Mexico. Through Facebook and CouchSurfing and A Small World, I reached out to strangers from Bucharest to Chennai, ensuring myself friendly local guides tostrange, new cultures. I scoured food blogs and Chowhound.com and eGullet.org so I’d know what to put in my mouth in Seoul and Budapest. I set up bank accounts and credit cards to maximize frequent-flier miles and minimize fees. I figured out how to store high-resolution Google maps on my iPhone so that I could reference them abroad without incurring roaming charges.
    For one Frugal Traveler column, I wrote about my system for getting the best possible deals on airfares. It was, I thought, a highly rational system, consisting of a dozen steps—or maybe twenty—that spanned the gamut of airline Web sites and third-party online travel agents and fare forecasters and seat recommenders (which is better, SeatGuru.com or SeatExpert.com ?), and I didn’t even get around to discussing the whole business of international-flight consolidators.
    Perhaps predictably, this column got a lot of responses: 217 people wrote in, many of them thanking me for the advice and some offering their own tips. Others, however, were more critical. One compared my method to “herding cats”; another said it made her head spin. Someone called “Buddy” from Houston, Texas, wrote, “So, you spent how many hours and saved how much for all that effort? Exactly how much is your time worth to you?”
    As it happens, this was a question I’d already begun to ask myself, in a slightly different form: What was the point of all this preparation?
    It’s not that I was utterly dissatisfied with how I was traveling. I never felt like I’d over -researched a trip, to the point where I was merely executing a set of pre-planned maneuvers through Paris or Bratislava. There were always moments of randomness, spontaneity, and serendipity. There was the bistro owner on the French Riviera who offered me a free meal if I’d send him video footage of his restaurant. There was the afternoon I walked into a Slovakian village, my feet blistered, my legs collapsing, and met a family who invited me in for fresh-baked pastries, homemade wine, and a place to spend thenight, out of the rain and safe from the Gypsies. Once, in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia, I was walking down a rocky beach when I somehow caught the attention of a quartet of hip locals in their early twenties; within minutes, we’d all stripped off our clothes and were skinny-dipping in the freezing surf. Although they later told me this was the “nudie beach,” I could find no reference to it on the Internet. You try it—Google “nudie beach” and see what you come up with.
    These episodes made me wonder if I needed the research part at all—they happened so naturally and beautifully they overshadowed the quotidian parts of the trip: checking into hotels, taking buses or trains from one spot to another, dutifully seeing sites considered historically or culturally important. More frustrating, when I’d sit down to write my articles, I’d find that including the quotidian stuff—which publications generally require, since they’re in the business of telling readers how to travel—left little room for the serendipitous moments that made the trips special to me.
    But if you’re going to be a professional travel writer, you can’t exactly stop researching your destinations or give up advising readers on how to travel. The business doesn’t work that way. You don’t call up an editor, tell them you want to go to Morocco or Ireland for a couple of weeks, and have them cut you a big check. And you don’t generally head off on your own dime to one of these places, hoping you’ll be able to turn your adventures into a salable story afterward.