Money in Europe

I first traveled to Europe as a student in the summer 1972, to Germany and Czechoslovakia and have been back (to Germany again for an extended teaching stay in 1981, including side trips to Switzerland, Greece, Italy, France, and England, and in the past decade France again, England again, Italy again, Germany and the Czech Republic again, Ireland, and now Spain). I’ve been very fortunate, and in the past 40 years of travel in Europe, I’ve seen four innovations that have made travel so so much easier, at least in the handling of money:

The universal credit card. In 1972 there was the American Express credit card, but it wasn’t available then to students. You couldn’t travel with the amount of cash needed for even a student trip, so American Express traveler’s checks were the only option. But if you showed up in, say, Paris on a Sunday morning (as I did), there were no banks open to exchange traveler’s checks, so you would have to eat in only the few restaurants that accepted American Express traveler’s checks (usually expensive and touristy). Very limiting.

Digital displays. On cash registers, hand calculators, or receipts, the digital display of the price of something makes knowing what the something costs instant, rather than having to know or translate the oral language of the cashier or waiter to know what to proffer or what change to expect.

The euro. You can now move from one country to another (with the exception of stodgy England) and carry the same currency. When I first went to Czechoslovakia (behind the Iron Curtain), the exchange rate was something like 1000 Crona (?) to $1; I was required to spend a minimum of $10/day total, something I thought easy until I found my hotel room was $4/day and full meals were $2 or less; it sounds much more at $10,000/day. And the German Mark (Western) at the time was something like 2DM to the $1, and you couldn’t exchange Marks for Crona in Czechoslovakia.

ATMs. The god of godsends. You can’t go more than a block or two without finding an ATM on the street of any major European city (or small town for that matter). And the exchange rate is as good or better than you can get at a bank and definitely better than at exchange shops or businesses. If you have an hour layover in, say, Brussels on your return and want to get a wonderful Belgian beer, you can use whatever euros you have left, or you can lay down your credit card, or you can walk across the concourse to the nearest ATM and get just the amount you need. Very easy, very flexible.