Keeping Control of Your Currency

Slovenian tolar in one pocket, Slovak koruna in the other, the shopkeeper wants to give me Croatian kuna to add to my confusion. That’s traveling life in Eastern Europe.

Foreign currencies are, of course, half the fun of traveling. One of my strongest memories of my childhood travels through Europe with my parents is the excitement of entering a new country and getting a handful of change after the first supermarket. My sister and I would scramble to see what kind of coins the new country had and we still have collections of many different Western European currencies.

Now that I'm a little older, I recognize the extra costs and complications of constantly changing currencies, and I've seen the ease of using the Euro throughout Western Europe. In June 2006 I reported that Slovenia will adopt the Euro from 1 January 2007, while at the same European Commission meeting, Lithuania's request to also introduce the Euro then was denied on the grounds that the inflation rate is still too high. The Euro is definitely spreading, but it'll take some years yet, and until then the fascination with Eastern European currencies is still a great part of traveling for me!