So, a bargoon-basement price trip to New Yawk is now $299.60 a day, eh? Actually, this NYT article by Seth Kugel has some useful tips on finding digs and came up with some interesting ways to do the Apple without having a two-year Visa hangover.

An excerpt:

We headed home for a brief rest. My plan for the evening: that $3 happy hour Guinness at the Lotus Club, then to the Brooklyn Museum, back to Manhattan for a bite to eat and a comedy show.

The first Saturday evening of the month, the Brooklyn Museum has free admission to an eclectic crowd of young and old, white and black, hip and frumpy, Orthodox Jews and unorthodox gentiles. We wandered the galleries, heard a DJ spin Prince, the Rolling Stones and the Jackson Five in the Beaux-Arts Court, and wandered into a packed hall where a Juilliard-trained drag queen named Shequida was performing a deadpan opera rendition of Missy Elliot's hip-hop hit "Work It" in front of a string quartet in tuxedos.

As a special two-for-one linking bargain, you should also see BBC Online's The Big Apple bargain blitz.