Bigger is Better

Well, not exactly. Different sized bills are better. The size of the Euro increases as the denomination increases, which results in small 5€ bills and big 100€ bills. I'm fairly sure that there's not a direct correlation in size, but maybe it's logarithmic or something. Anyway, I really like the Euro. It's colorful, aesthetically pleasing, with varying designs on the coins. I guess good, old-fashioned American currency is pretty cool too, but it's not nearly as charming as an orange bill. Here're some of the things I've observed about the Euro so far.

ATMs don't just give you $20 bills. In fact, they don't give any $20 bills, because they would be pretty useless here. Instead they give you 20€ bills, as well as 10€ and 50€ bills just to spice things up a little. What this means is that you can withdraw increments that aren't multiples of 20€ ! It's insane ! I'm putting a space between the last word and the exclamation point because that's how they do it here in France ! I'm not sure if they do it in the rest of Europe, but they do it here. When in Rome... (or Paris, I guess...)

Pretty much everything you buy is paid for in increments of 0.10€. That's ten centimes, but I don't know what the sign is for centime on my keyboard, so it's 0.10€. Like, un café is usually 1.10€ instead of like, $3.18. It's not that I'm getting a really cup of coffee either, it's just that it's really, really small. And it's a multiple of 0.10€. So my point is that pennies (or the Euro equivalents) pretty much don't exist. You only deal in pennies (I'm still using this word for convenience) when you go to the grocery store. It's kind of nice, because you don't have to carry around a bunch of change, but it's also kind of bad because sometimes I feel like I'm being ripped off by people rounding up all the time (if they in fact do round up, which I'm not sure about).

Different sized bills are both a boon and a burden. They're great, because you can easily tell them apart (good for blind people, of whom it seems there are a many), but also kind of a pain in the butt, because when you try to fold a stack of them in half, you're usually not folding the smaller ones in half, but instead in some weird fraction that isn't a half (terrible for OCD people, of whom there are 497--there's actually a record of this in la Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, which I visited yesterday.) Stuff like that. I could come up with more but I have to wake up early tomorrow, so maybe I'll write more about this later.

Au revoir. (Or would it be au relire?)