When I got off the bus at Ferihegy airport, I bought a pastry and a cup of coffee–then I looked into my wallet to discover I had just 15 Forint left. That’s about $.02. It seems, the better you come to know a place that you visit, the more likely you are end up at the airport with just a little left of the local currency. In this case, I just got lucky.
Performing conversions was simpler in Forint than it usually is for me: the exchange rate is almost exactly 200 Forint to the dollar, so you just move the decimal point and divide by two. Or you just program your eyes to look at a 1000 Forint note and see a five-dollar bill. I am always happy to get home and see how good US currency looks compared to all the Monopoly money out there.
When I first arrived in Frankfurt, I started making notes for a new post: ‘Germany on $200 an hour’. To American tourists in Europe: stay as far away from the euro as you can.
