The Euro Turns Twenty

My niece is on a school trip to Russia, and she and a couple of her friends are tacking on a trip to Budapest. Which meant a trip to the bank to pick up rubles and forints. Banks around here stock Euros, British pounds, Canadian dollars and (maybe: I don’t know for sure) Mexican pesos. So if you’re going any place more exotic, and you want to enter the country with a few buck-equivalents in your pocket, you need to order ahead and have your foreign exchange imported from New York.

With a few exceptions – Scotland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland – almost all of my European trips over the past 20 years have been to Euro-zone countries. This makes traveling to and fro a lot easier. The bank has Euros on hand, so you can get it the day you walk in looking for it. And once you’re home, any left over cash can just be tucked in with the passport for use the next time over.

The downside if a uni-currency is that you don’t have the pleasure of figuring out what that 5,000 whatever note is worth in American. And, of course, you miss out on learning about the worthies that make it onto a country’s legal tender.

Take Hungarian statesman Ferenc Deák de Kehida, "The Wise Man of the Nation”, who graces the 20,000 forint note, which is worth about seventy bucks.

Seriously, who among us would have much if any familiarity with Ferenc Deák if we hadn’t found him in our wallets?

And then there’s good old N.N.Muravjov-Amursky, posing on the Russian 5,000 ruble note.

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Yep! Another statesman that I haven’t heard of. Admittedly, my fluency is Russian history is just a smidge ahead of my fluency in Hungarian history. Pretty much all I know about Russian history is Tsars and Tsarinas, To the Finland Station, Lenin, Stalin…Khrushchev…Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin. That and Dr. Zhivago.

Currency as a learning experience!

Our currency has statemen, too. (Franklin and Hamilton) That and dead presidents. Maybe someday there’ll be Harriet Tubman…

Which brings us (or me, at least) to the Euro, which has doorways on it, not people. Guess it’s just too difficult to make everyone happy by picking and choosing statesmen/women et al.

The Euro is observing it’s 20th birthday this year, which means it wasn’t around the first time I visited Europe in 1973 with my friend Joyce.

Europe in 1973 meant carrying Traveler’s Checks, and exchanging currency every time you crossed a border.

First up: Great Britain, where we got us some pounds, which fortunately were used in Scotland and Wales, too. Then off to Ireland, where we bought some punts.

In France, it was francs. French francs. Not to be confused with Swiss francs. Or Belgian francs. Or Luxembourg francs. Or Monégasque francs. All of which we needed at some point or another.

We did a lot of wandering and wondering.

In Denmark, we got krone. Similar to but different than Norwegian krone. Similar to but different than Swedish krone.

Germany meant deutschmark. Austria mixed it up with schillings. And thankfully Yugoslavia was one country, not a whole bunch of countries. So we just needed dinars until we hit the Greek border, when we cashed them in for drachma.

Turkey had lira. So did Italy, which, unlike most countries, didn’t have change when we were there – just bills. If you went into a store and handed them lira, they gave you back hard candy or tokens to use in the phones. In Spain, we used pesetas.

Fortunately, parochial school – with all those mental arithmetic drills - prepared me well for on the fly computing on what any currency was worth. It also kept us from getting screwed out of 15,000 Italian lira at the currency exchange when we got off the boat from Piraeus, Greece in Bari. I held my ground – this was, if I remember things right, worth about $20; a lot more than we spent on any given day, given that we hosteled or camped everywhere we went. The fellow behind the counter just shrugged and gave me the right amount.

In an American Express office somewhere in Switzerland – American Express being “home away” for Americans abroad: where you could cash your Traveler’s Checks, buy currency, and pick up your mail – an American business school student convinced us to convert our Traveler’s Checks to Swiss francs.

A few weeks later, in an American Express office somewhere in Germany, another American business school student convinced us to convert our Traveler’s Checks to Deutschmark.

Thanks to these business types, the thousand dollars a piece we had brought for four months hitching around Europe went a lot further, and Joyce and I each managed to bring home $400 a piece. (Imagine that: 4 months in Europe for $600. There really was a time when you could see the world on Five Dollars a Day…)

The Euro sure would have made traveling easier, but we wouldn’t have been able to play the currency markets and make some money on each transaction.

Anyway, as a traveler, I like the Euro, and wish it a happy birthday. Hope it lasts…