So our next trip involves visiting six different countries, with five of them being first-time visits bringing our European checklist up to 30 countries visited of the current total of 50 European nations.
The route was chosen not so much by us as by Skyscanner.net We simply entered our starting point, set the destination to ‘Everywhere’ and went for the cheapest flight available as long as it was somewhere we’d never been to before, and somewhere we really wanted to visit.
I’ve just looked into what currencies are used in the countries we will be spending money in. It would be easy to do a 6 country tour of Europe and find that all of them use the same currency – the Euro. That makes things so easy, but we don’t do easy 🙂 No, our 6 European Country tour involves, you guessed it, 6 different currencies.
First stop Stockholm, off the top of my head I thought that would be in the Eurozone, but nope, got that wrong, shamefully wrong to be honest because we’ve been to Sweden before – a great long weekend visiting Malmo and Copenhagen and crossing The Oresund Bridge, better known to us as simply The Bridge, featured in our favourite TV programme of the same name (see Denmark and Sweden). We will be spending Swedish krona there. currently £1 = 11.42 SEK
Next up we will be reaching into our pockets for LEUs to spend in Bucharest and Timisoara, currently, one pound buys us 5.29 Leu.
We will be spending our first wedding anniversary in Belgrade, Serbia, where £1 will buy us 133.93 Dinar!
Only one country on this itinerary has the official currency of the Euro, and surprisingly to me, that one country is Kosovo. £1 = 1.14 Euros. Further south to Macedonia and we’re back to the Dinar. Well almost, in Skopje they spell it Denar and at the time of writing £1 = 70.05 Denar.
Over to Sofia in Bulgaria, ready for a quick visit and flight home, we’ll be needing Levs. 2.22 of them equalling 1 GBP. Carol’s been there before, so we’ll have to see how many she brought back from her last trip.
Phew…so the next problem is how do we make sure we have the currency we need? We are not big fans of currency exchange places due to the fact you can get severely ripped off through these. We could get Euros but then we would be paying two lots of exchange fees. What we normally do is go to local cashpoints (making sure they are recommended or in public locations) and also pay in local currency rather than the GBP conversion rate which is guaranteed to lose you a few quid. This is looking like our preferred method right now either that or pay by card where possible! We will update how we get on with our levs, leus, denars, dinars, euros and kronas eek!
One thought on “Currency Conundrum”