Not Seeing Clearly

One of the other things needed for Ireland was money, of course. Euros and Great British Pounds as Northern Ireland and Glasgow are on pounds and the rest of Ireland on Euros.I'd been reading and was told that it's getting very hard to cash traveller's cheques. I presumed because of the amount of forgeries and counterfeiting.

So, I called my bank's central phone number and told them which branch I'd be going to and about how many Euros I would need, as well as when I'd be coming in. They said no problem, there will be enough. I dropped in on Friday, though I had been thinking of doing it this Tuesday afternoon. I'm very glad I didn't wait.

I arrived to find they had nowhere near enough Euros. I had a wedding and work on the car on Saturday. They were closed Sunday, and other branches were closed Wednesay as well as me working. They called around but no branches had enough. Eventually, after 45 minutes the bank scraped up every Euro they had. I ended up with a rather large wad of 5s, 10s, 20s, 50s, and one 100. It's bulky and it's a lot of money. But kudos to Vancity for coming through.

So that night I'm telling my friend Lorna about the Euro crisis and she says: There are banking machines all over Europe. You could have just withdrawn the money there. Arrgghh!

The last major travelling I did outside of the US was to Cuba where there weren't many if any banking machines and I just brought cash, bringing most of it home again. Before that was India in 1989 and even today I'd be dubious about parts of the country being up to date with banking machines. Sigh, you learn a few lessons and at least this wasn't a bad one to learn.