Wednesday, April 10, 2002
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Wednesday, April 10, 2002 |
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A whole new currency or 300 million people change their change By
SALLIES SATTERTHWAITE
The Big Change has swept through Europe. Twelve countries, "300 million people" have switched to the new European Union currency, the euro. I can picture the locals pondering their palms, making mental calculations as we tourists have for years. When we first traveled to Germany in the mid-1980s, our daughter Mary became impatient with us for persistently doing the math before we made purchases. But when the menu says lunch is going to cost 20DM, I'm going to enjoy it a whole lot more if I figure out that it will be a little less than $9 by the time my Visa bill taps my savings account. That's still more than I'd spend at home. "Just get used to German prices," Mary insisted, and maybe I could have if we had stayed in Germany the whole time we were in Europe. Our habit, however, is to make Mary's Gelsenkirchen apartment our base and roam the continent from there. That meant shifting gears at each border to recalculate the worth of a dollar and avoid paying too much by accident. What goes around comes around, as folk wisdom has it, and now Mary and millions of Germans, Belgians, Greeks, Italians, Austrians, Finns and Luxembourgers, as well as the Portuguese, French, Irish, Spanish and Dutch, get to feel like financial illiterates without leaving their neighborhood bistros or outdoor markets. Prices have been marked in euros as well as in the local currency for more than a year to give people a sense of the euro's worth. The official changeover took place Jan. 1, with the euro equaling roughly two Deutschmarks. A month later Mary was, at least briefly, enjoying the perceived "reduced" prices. "The old prices are listed, often, in DM, then the new price in Euro, then the marked-down [after-Christmas sale] price," she wrote. "Since the Euro is about two Marks, everything looks like an incredible bargain!" I see she's got her own shorthand conversion mastered, the way I did to compare dollars and marks. "Everything written in Euros is half the price it was in Marks. My haircut yesterday was 15 Euros (instead of 30 DM) and I tipped one-and-a-half Euros." The euro is worth about 88 U.S. cents, so that 15-euro haircut would have cost us just over $13. Incidentally, the English pronunciation seems to be "YOO-row," although the Irish are the only English-speaking nation to adopt it. Mary, and I presume other German-speakers, pronounce it "OY-row," in accordance with German rules of pronunciation. Lord knows how the French say it. May take awhile before everyone settles on pronunciation and punctuation. In English, euro is not capitalized, but its official abbreviation is EUR, all caps. In German all nouns are capped; when I quote Mary, I guess I should write as she does, "Euro" and "Mark." The euro is divided into 100 cents, like the dollar. I haven,t heard "cent" pronounced yet. Is it universally "sent" as English would have it, or the nasal "sahn" the French would say, or does it depend on where you are? The colorful official euro Web site www.euro.ecb.int/en.html has lots of interesting information on the new system. For instance, the seven banknotes, as Europeans call paper money, are printed alike for the entire European Union. On the face of each, the 12 stars of the European Union appears on a background of windows and gateways depict "the European spirit of openness and cooperation," the Web site says. The reverse has a bridge, symbolizing "the close cooperation and communication between Europe and the rest of the world." No dead emperors and queens here. Each note is a different color, features a different period of architecture, and is sized to represent its value. For example, the EUR 5 is the smallest (EUR 1 and Eur 2 are coins) and is gray, with classical architecture. The largest, the EUR 500, is purple and has modern 20th century architecture. The EUR 10, 20, 50, 100, and 200 are, respectively, red, blue, orange, green and yellow-brown, and architecturally reflect Romanesque, gothic, renaissance, baroque and rococo, and iron and glass. Commendably, the sizing and colors were designed to make it easier for the visually-impaired to sort their banknotes. An imbedded holographic strip helps make the bills resistant to counterfeiting. The eight denominations of coins are not only sized for identification, but have varying colors, thickness, and milled edges according to value: 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, |
