Le Sud de France 4.6: A Fistful of Euros

The Only Good Euro Is A Chocolate One!!!

You know it’s gotten bad when, instead of talking about kitchen remodeling at a party, the conversation begins with, “So how much longer do you think the Euro will last?”

Despite the hope of unifying the nations of Europe after the brutality of World War II the Euro obviously has not. 16 nations use the Euro and they’ve lost the individual flexibility they once had to adjust the value of their money to deal with economic problems. It makes for a lot of bad feelings between these supposedly united countries and the papers and TV are full of reports about the future of the currency.

The Euro became the single currency in 1999. We were in France then and could see that it wasn’t off to a good start. The French had issued new Francs in 1960 to replace old Francs--a revaluation of the currency--and after forty years people had sort of adjusted to it. Prices were still listed in both the old and new Francs and older folks kept cookie jars stuffed with the old bills-- just in case. 

What I did see a lot of then was how uncomfortable people were with the new currency. When the Euro came along prices were converted into Euros and rounded off--and always upwards. People saw that price hike and resented it. 

Acceptance of the new currency has remained awkward and today after 12 years, prices are still given in both Euros and their equivalent in Francs, and in parts of France you can even use Francs for purchases. 

The Euro coinage is also very confusing and at first many old people would just open their purses or extend a handful of coins to a cashier to let them figure out which coins were needed to pay for a purchase. Sadly I still see that happening today.

How in the world did some EU genius in Brussels, or a committee of geniuses, come up with the idea of having eight different coins for their currency? There are 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50 Euro cent coins and the one and two Euro coins. And as you can see in the photo below they were cleverly designed to be similar in color and design. And all the coins are small and that makes them clumsy to handle.

By comparison the US gets along with just four coins in everyday use; the penny (one cent), the nickel (five cents), the dime (ten cents) and the quarter dollar (twenty-five cents) and each is a different enough that it is easy to tell them apart. There are also fifty cent pieces and dollar coins but you rarely see or use them.

The eight Euro coins make it hard to quickly make change for a payment  and it ends up slowing down cashier  lines and such. 

My biggest bugaboo is how hard it is to get rid of the damn things. Every time I'd go shopping it seems that the number of coins in my pocket always increased in number and weight. 

That's because when you pay for something, cashiers generally try to give you back as many coins as possible. It's like the kid's game of "hot potato." Finally I began to fight back with what I call  "the its your change game."

My strategy is to give the cashier the amount of coins first and then the bills. For example, if my purchase is 34.52 Euros, I hand the cashier 52 cents worth of coins, in as many small coins as possible. And then, only after the coins do I hand over the bigger coins like the 1 and 2 Euros. Then I move on to the paper notes. 

It takes practice but it works.

Debussy on top, Euro bridges below.

I personally dislike the look of the Euro currency designs. The coins are lackluster and the bills feature really boring images of “bridges.” To me it is an ugly currency that sadly replaced some of the most beautiful paper around; like this French Franc with its portrait of composer Claude Debussy. 

While no one knows what will happen with the Euro in the future the feelings towards it aren't good. The responses to the question posed at lunch about how long the Euro will last were pretty negative. A British ex-pilot said, “3 or 4 years” while a Dutch engineer responded dryly, “Hardly that.” Later I saw a TV commentator give it 5 months.

In my case, my response is, 'If it goes, I won't miss it."

Sud de France 4.2: Twisting the world away.

It was announced today--23 November--that Ireland is accepting the European Union’s bailout plan. That's like getting offered a ride home from the drunk on the next bar stool; probably neither of you will get home safely. The problem only gets worse when you consider that among the other drunks who are offering you rides there's Greece, Italy, Spain, England and Portugal. 

In part the problem is the European  bureaucracy. In my blog posts I’ve poked fun at the French bureaucracy and the European Union--which is like the French model on steroids. These structures have done little to contain the bank crisis but a lot to frustrate and anger the populations of Europe. In response to these vast regulatory organizations individuals figure ways around the rules, the taxes and the letter of the law. I'm learning the game of getting around roadblocks but I'm still not comfortable with it.   

Which brings me to today’s new French word; “tordu.” This translates roughly as twisted and in many ways it sums up the situation here in France and around Europe.

A legume tordu

I learned this word and experienced it first hand when my wife and I went looking for a car. We’d found one we liked, negotiated a price and sat down with the dealer ready to write a check. It made him very happy. We gave him our passports, our RIB (proof of a bank account) and credit card info. He began to do the paperwork and after a few minutes asked us if we had a “facture” that is a utility receipt, usually one from the electric company. In France it’s proof of your address. 

This is tordu number one, we don’t have any utility bills because we are renting a place and the owners pay those expenses. We explained this and the dealer who made an unhappy face and said the law requires a facture to get the license plates. When I asked him why the address on our bank checks wasn’t sufficient he said with a sneer,

“Tout est tordu en France.” In France everything is twisted. 

See that’s the twisted part because to get the bank account open we had to get the bank a facture. Since we had been in France for only ten days and had nothing with an address on it, we got our kids to send us the closing electric bill from former home in America. Despite it being a closing bill for a place we no longer lived in or owned it worked for the bank. 

So a facture from a place 4500 miles away was put in our bank dossier or file probably never to be seen again. We got our checks although they had our US address on them. But that was easy to change because we now had an account we got our French address on the checks just by asking

Following this? Even though it took a facture to get our bank account open, we still needed another facture for the car because the account isn’t a facture, a receipt, but an account. Now that’s tordu! Zut alors!

It is kind of like the line in the movie, “Jake, you can’t do anything its Chinatown.” Don’t to try to understand it, it is just the way it is.

Since we couldn’t use the U.S. electric bill again (it was too old by now) my challenge was to figure how to get a facture. This called for thinking outside the box and I arrived at a solution that any Frenchman would be proud of. We had gotten a promotional letter from the bank thanking us for opening our account and asking how much money we wanted. I’d thrown it into the garbage but now made a mad dash to retrieve it.

The trick was to turn the promotional letter into a facture and to do this I went to the local phone store to get the Blackberry phone I had been thinking of buying. When you get a phone you sign up for a two year contract and they give you a receipt with your address on it.  

At the store I chose a phone and gave the clerk our passports and the bank letter. I watched as he copied the address from the letter. Then he made a photocopy of the letter for his store dossier and gave me the phone and receipt—a facture! We went immediately to the dealer who took the ten minute old facture and made a photocopy of it for his dossier, saying that the car would be ready in a few days.

That’s the real lesson. In response to all tordu culture the place is full of phony dossiers. Big paper files for everything that just end up sitting in some huge Kafkaesque warehouse somewhere gathering dust. None of the information gathered in the dossiers is ever connected to another dossier. 

I think this happens because no one in Europe wants to be the decider; to take responsibility for decisions. Instead they generate piles of PAPER with which they cover their asses. The byzantine nature of the law forces everyone to collect paper pretending it has some purpose. It’s a Dickensian world of thick files, fountain pen bearing clerks and photocopies of photocopies. Sadly Europe is at a tipping point. If governments can’t make their systems transparent enough for people to trust them and use them how will the compete in the global market place.

Devices like my Blackberry are the tools of the future. The big, thick paper dossier is a dinosaur, out of the information dark ages, a sad reminder of the rigidity of the old world.  

Bureaucracy at work is best illustrated by this EU poster. The area on the globe that is highlighted is the Balkans, Russia, Ukraine and the Middle East. Most of the EU itself is stuck in the dark behind and under the flag.