Chai tea is normally associated with India. As the New World Encyclopedia explains, “This way of drinking tea emerged during the British control of India, at a time when the British India Company encouraged the consumption of black tea.” While the origin story behind this most beloved of hipster beverages varies, one theory is that the recipe was devised as an economic measure to reduce the amount of tea needed per cup. Regardless, vendors on countless street corners across the world have applied their own unique spicing creativity and preparation approach to create a vast spectrum of chai tea flavors — an “almost infinite variety” of aromas and flavor nuances. 

So why is the African nation of Kenya one of the places to experience this odd artifact of colonization and culinary experimentation? Because, for reasons slightly mysterious, chai has been embraced right down to the bones of Kenyan cultural life, so much so that the Swahili word for tea is “chai.” According to All Things Kenyan, the beverage is so desirable there that the word has even become synonymous with accepting a bribe. On street corners throughout downtown Nairobi, vendors steep their own family blend of chai, and you can grab a few steaming mugs of this cultural uniqueness for a dollar, probably with a bit of change to spare.

Tourists in New York lucky enough to find themselves on the right street corner or subway station can lay down a crisp dollar note to experience what may be a life-altering zenith of embarrassingly awkward street theater. 

Interviewed for Guff Magazine, New York street performer Kalan describes his art as a “non-narrative, nihilist, anarchist show about literary theory.” Even better than that, though, Kalan uses an assortment of socially confronting puppets made from trash and discarded meat products. Wielded artfully, these foul-smelling fetishes invite Kalan’s audience to question their most basic assumptions — about life, capitalism, and the relative merits of educational Muppets made from street detritus. 

A dollar is a small price to pay for an audience member’s mind and soul (and possibly their nasal passages, depending on the freshness of Kalan’s puppetry selection) to be laid so thoroughly bare. As Kalan phrases it on his website, “Death stalks the garden and unmasked beings belch forth inverted offspring as God devours the sun. Nothing exists.”

Sardinia is the second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, and while it has close cultural ties to Italy, it’s an autonomous territory, with a solid chunk of its domestic sovereignty intact. Sardinia is a strange place, culturally. Predictably enough, Italian is spoken there, but the island also has a bizarrely cool indigenous language called Sardo, a linguistic shopping basket brimming with Latin, Arabic, Spanish, and Catalan flavors. They also invented sardines. This is a matter of some importance, judging by how vehemently the Total Sardinia website promulgates that sardines are, in fact, named after Sardinia and not the other way around.

With its linguistic eccentricities and strongly held fish opinions, it’s probably reasonable to assume that living in Sardinia would be an unusual experience. And a home base for that experience can be bought for the paltry price of one dollar, well, $1.17 to be exact. As Live and Invest Overseas reports, the mayor of one of Sardinia’s main towns, Ollolai, is offering 200 homes, some of them for a bit over a dollar a piece. Sadly, Ollolai is in decline, with the vast majority of its younger inhabitants having left the town in search of work. It’d probably be a hard life to set up a new home in a poverty-riddled township on an isolated island somewhere in the Mediterranean. But there’d be fresh air, rolling hills, and an abundance of tinned fish in a wide variety of seasonings. Swings and roundabouts.