O.K., so you’re broke. It doesn’t matter why. Maybe you make minimum wage putting those infernal plastic seals on CD cases, or maybe you’re too busy writing experimental theater pieces to go to work. What’s important is that you live in Charlottesville, one of the pricier small cities in America, and you’re tired of seeing the horse farmers and pop-music moguls have all the fun.
Need to snag a meal? Don’t settle for Ramen and popcorn ever again. Trying to dress decently? You can do it without selling your soul to J. Crew. For every financial gate that seemingly stands between you and the good life, there’s a little golden key buried somewhere nearby. Read on, treasure hunters.
Grocery-getter
Of course you already realize that the bulk section of certain grocery stores is a gold mine for the unscrupulous customer who’s wicked enough to write the PLU for cheap rolled oats on her bag of $15-a-pound imported hazelnuts. And you realize that’s technically, er, stealing. But check this out: When grocery stores—I’m not saying Harris Teeter, necessarily—have stuff they can’t sell (less-than-perfect produce, expired dairy and bakery products, and so on), guess what they do with it? Yep, they THROW IT AWAY. Guess what happens next? You, smartest of shoppers, pay a visit to their dumpster and HELP YOURSELF.
Don’t put your health in danger, of course. But remember that the sell-by date on a carton of milk is calculated to give the buyer enough time to drink that milk before it goes bad. So if it’s one day expired, you really only lose a day compared to the fool who paid for it yesterday. Fruits and veggies that the squeamish would bypass (spotted apples, cabbage wilting on the outside) can be perfectly edible with a little basic knife-work. Just remember: BYO bags!
Start your day off right
Looking for the most important meal of the day? Broke? All I’m saying is that certain hotels—the Hampton, the Ramada, the Fairfield—offer free continental breakfast to their guests. One hotel at the corner of 10th and W. Main streets has not only coffee, pastries and fruit, but a free Internet station in the lobby, near the crackling fireplace. The key to staying incognito here is to look like you belong—and nothing says “Back off, my company already paid for it” like one of those corporate IDs on a lanyard around your neck. A briefcase wouldn’t hurt either, and it sure will hold a lot of bagels. Hey, don’t hotels have pools too? Why, yes. Yes, they do.
Feel great, cheapskate
Swimming is one of the best all-around exercises there is. Throw in running from hotel guards and climbing hotel fences, and you’ve got a wicked good workout. Centrally located hotels with heated indoor pools: the Omni and the Courtyard by Marriott.
On those days when you’re after tranquility rather than an adrenaline-laced cardio pounding, practice yoga at Union Yoga Loft or Body, Mind, Spirit—at either one, your first class is free. (Invest in a fake-nose-and-glasses disguise and become the impossible: a repeat first-time student.) Studio 206 makes all its classes free for one week each spring and fall. But the best yoga deal of all is surely Ninja Yoga: ALWAYS free. Yep, that’s right: learn downward dog for zero dollars at the Central Library Mondays at 1pm, Tuesdays at 5pm and Thursdays at 5pm. There are also classes at the Community Space, 1117 E. Market St., at 1pm on Tuesday and Wednesday. Call 960-3994 for more info.
Move about; don’t shell out
Talk about time travel: Remember in Back to the Future how Marty McFly gets around town by hopping on his skateboard and grabbing the back of a pickup truck? Load up Huey Lewis on your headphones, lace up your Nike high-tops, and embrace your inner 1985-era Michael J. Fox as you surf your way to work or school.
Even if you’re a bit more risk-averse than McFly, you can still travel on the cheap. Here’s a nearly free way to get (literally) around town. Say you live in Belmont and you want to go shopping at the Dollar Place at Pantops. Ride your bike to the end of E. Market Street and jump on the paved Rivanna Trail at Riverview Park—a pleasant alternative route toward Route 250. When you’re done at Pantops, catch the Nos. 10 and 6 buses (putting your bike on the front) to Barracks Road for some quality time at Barnes & Noble, reading in comfy chairs at no charge. (Go ahead, finish the book! Do they expect you to buy it?) Then take a UVA bus to the Corner (according to University Transportation Services, you almost certainly won’t need a University ID unless you “cause a problem”) for your free counseling session at the Women’s Center, after which you can ride the trolley downtown at absolutely no charge. Get there in time for happy hour at Miller’s and you can fend off those therapy-induced revelations for only $1 a drink—and still be staggering home to Belmont by dinnertime.
No such thing?
Once you’ve exhausted the Christian’s Pizza/Bodo’s Bagels/Marco and Luca axis of tasty meals for under $5, you’re ready to graduate to the advanced school of cheap eats. The Darden School at UVA is known to cater numerous seminars and meetings. (All those future MBAs have to practice simultaneous schmoozing and chewing, after all.) Lucky for you, the food is conveniently laid out on tables in the hallways, rather than the classrooms. Look reasonably professional, and there’s no reason you can’t blend in and eat your fill. An anonymous reporter in ill-fitting dress pants recently enjoyed lunch and coffee in Darden’s gracious lobby, gratis. (Emboldened, the reporter then checked out the nearby School of Law, but found it much less generous, institutionally speaking.) Nearest free parking: Millmont Street, just down the hill. CONT. P. 21
Food and conversation
A frugal aunt and uncle of mine, when they were young and poverty-stricken, used to make a date out of walking the mile from their house to a gas station. There they’d buy a single candy bar, then split it on the walk home. The end.
Sweet, huh? You can be a cheap date without going to such extremes. Start your evening at the Brick Café in Scottsville, ordering a perfectly tasty and filling personal-size pizza with two toppings: an easy $4.64. Take a nice after-dinner stroll along the James River: free. Then head back to Charlottesville for the late movie at the Jefferson: $3. (Bring-your-own candy bar: 75 cents. Go on—get two, you crazy lovebirds!)
Get connected
Ah, wi-fi—a glorious invention and so much better than getting your hands dirty with those free-trial AOL CDs that come in the mail. If you’re not lucky enough to have a downstairs or next-door neighbor whose wireless you can tap, here’s what you do: Get in your car. Boot up your laptop. Drive around your neighborhood. Find someone with a wireless Internet connection who has failed to secure it. Park your car. E-mail your friends.
When you get tired of people who come outside with a shotgun acting all territorial about their bandwidth, you may decide to try playing by the rules. In that case, the library is your friend. Use it. The Central Li-brary’s Monticello Avenue lab, on the mezzanine level, has enough computers so that you usually won’t have to wait; all
you need is a library card. There are also quick e-mail stations on the main level. Similarly, the Mud-house’s Downtown lo-cation offers a computer at no charge (avoid disapproving glances from baristas by springing for a day-old muffin: $1).
Five-spot shopper
Buying clothes, wear-ing them to parties, then returning them the next day is so time-consuming. Plus, you have to answer a bunch of redundant questions from salesclerks. (“What do you mean, ‘What’s that wine-colored stain?’”) Instead, pay a visit to the Green Olive Tree in Crozet, a secondhand shop. Toward the end of each month (call 823-4523 for exact dates), the Green Olive Tree will sell you an entire bag of clothing for only $5. It gets better: In March and August, as the seasons are changing, the $5 sale becomes a “5-4-3-2-1” sale. Each week the price of the bag goes down by a buck, until they’re practically giving the stuff away. This is the kind of deal that’s so good it makes you feel like sending a thank-you note.
Feed your head
Luckily, being an intellectual doesn’t have to mean shelling out for an Ivy League degree. There are lots of ways to get smarter, cheaper. Free University events include gallery talks, lectures and poetry readings; check out www.virginia.edu/ news.html for event listings on Grounds. If you’d rather curl up with a good book, “shop” at the free-book trailer in the McIntire Road Recycling Center. Looking for magazines? The Scottsville library has a giveaway box where you can snag free copies of used magazines donated by other patrons. Or visit the Northside branch during January or February, when the library purges magazine holdings and makes the throwaways available for keeps.
If there’s something specific you want to learn, take advantage of the major university that’s right in our backyard, and audit a course. Officially, you can’t sit in on a class unless you’re a registered student. Unofficially, it’s likely you can get away with joining a UVA course without asking anyone’s permission—as long as the class size is large enough. Spring semester offerings in-clude Introductory So-ciology (class size cap-ped at a hefty 260) and History of Photog-raphy (class size 150). Just show up and look interested, and most professors will be happy to have you (that is, if they even notice you’re there). And remember, audit is Latin for “no tests or papers.”
Park it
So, you work Downtown, commute from
the county and can’t stomach paying for all-day parking?
Random thoughts about the Barracks Road Shopping Center: It sure is convenient to the 250 Bypass. It sure is big. There sure are a lot of parking spots there. It sure is close to UVA and public bus stops. Those buses sure can get you into central Charlottesville.
Fact about riding a bike from Belmont to the Downtown Mall, say, for example, because you parked at the former: It’s all downhill. Fact about downhill biking: It doesn’t get your work clothes sweaty. Fact about uphill biking: It’s a great way to blow off steam after a hard day on the job.
Advice about those usually empty, government-only spots around Court Square: Don’t even think about it.
Out on the freetown
You already know about the free sports at UVA (soccer, tennis, track and field, and lots of others), the free cheese-and-mingling at McGuffey Art Center on First Fridays, and the free tastings offered by many area wineries. Check this out: Better Than Tel-evision, a community space in the basement of the Jeffer-son Theater on the Downtown Mall, is your one-stop shop for low- or no-cost entertainment. This place has free movies on Thursday nights, free pancakes and disco on Tuesday nights, a library and a ping-pong table. Now here is a crew of people who are not only fun, innovative and friendly, but have a certifiable political commitment to the cheap and the free—many are anarchists. Here’s what John Bylander, an organizer of the space, says: “We encourage people to wander around. It’s not
a store. We’re not going to ask you to buy something.” You gotta love that. Check
out the current schedule on the space’s front door.
Better living
If you happen to be hanging around the entrance to the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority, be sure to keep your eyes peeled. Sooner or later, someone’s bound to come along with furniture strapped to the roof of their Lexus. Everybody wins: You get a sofa, they avoid the disposal fee and one less object goes in the landfill!
If you’d rather avoid the face-to-face method of dumpster diving, go west, young ninja! Staunton is Charlottesville’s sister city, and once a year in spring she acts like an older sister, providing us with tons of cool hand-me-downs. Need a bookshelf? An oscillating fan? A barbecue pit? Almost any other household item you can think of? Whereas Charlottesville removes residents’ large trash items individually year-round, Staunton throws what amounts to a big city- wide trash party each April: everybody throws out everything at once. So the city’s ordinary streets and sidewalks become, essentially, one giant mall where everything is free. Call 540-332-3892 for this year’s exact dates, and start making friends now with someone who owns a pickup truck.