I am pleased to report that on my recent trip to Spain I found the euro being very well accepted by the Spanish people.
I do have to admit that most of the places I visited were "tourist areas". Thus, my experiences may not be typical of all of Spain. The tourists find the euro to be advantageous so they prefer to use it and the locals, anxious to please the tourists (and get their money in whatever form) oblige. (On the other hand, the area I visited gets its tourists mostly from England. Perhaps the English are not as anti-euro as some have said.) The Spanish are still having their problems with the conversion from pesetas to euros, but they seem to be willing to make the effort and adapt. The conversion from pesetas is about 166 pta = 1 € *, thus they have to think of prices in a whole different range of numbers and they find that difficult. Also, there is much evidence that they are continuing to think in pesetas and then making the conversion to euros only at the point where it is necessary. ---------- *The symbol € , above, is the euro symbol on my computer but may perhaps not show correctly on yours. ---------- Prices are often (usually?) in reasonably round numbers of pesetas. It is required that the euro price be shown along with the peseat price but there were many instances where pesetas only were shown. Those prices are then converted to euros when the customer makes a purchase. For example: I wanted to purchase a drink at a road side restaurant. I asked how much the drink was in euros. The bar tender apparently knew the price in pasetas but had to go to the cash register to find what it would be in euros. (The cash registers are computerized and programmed to do the calculation automatically.) The cash register receipt showed the price in pasetas first (550 pta) and the converted amount second (3.31 €). Then, interestingly, he only charged me 3.30 € . On a side trip to Morocco, we found euros to be equally accetable with the dollar or the Moroccan currency (whose name I have forgotten, since we did not use any on our short visit). The Moroccan vendors we encountered simply equated euros and dollars. Since they always bargain a great deal anyway, all prices in any currency are approximate by such a large amount that it didn't matter much whether you paid in a certaqin number of dollars or in the same number of euros. Of course, we always got the better deal by paying in euros. But then again, we probably didn't bargain them down far enough in the first place. Regards, Bill Hooper +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Do It Easy, Do It Metric! +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
