Here we go again. The US dollar is now worth only 99 Swiss cents. Another interest rate cut is in the offing, which will doubtless hasten the dollar’s crash. To think that a Swiss Franc was once something of which you could get several for a dollar, and now you can’t even get one.
How much longer can the Fed undermine the currency in the name of political expediency before the whole thing blows up in our faces? What good is availability of credit if the dollar is worth, say, one Mexican peso?
Good luck with that. You just about need a celebrity’s resources and income if you want to go there and be comfortable while you’re there (i.e., not hosteling or camping).
I saw the best interview the other day on the news. English journalist asking folks on the street in NYC about shopping. Anybody from the UK he talks to is like ‘woo-hoo!’ and getting stonkin’ good deals. He talks to these two older women from Iowa or something, and one says ‘I wouldn’t spend my money in Europe no matter what. I made my money in America, I will spend my money in America’ whilst wearing a red-white-and-blue t-shirt and with a slight lunatic uber-patriot glaze to her eye.
Without missing a beat and without smiling, the journalist says ‘well, yes, but you can’t afford to come to England, can you?’
I laughed so hard my girlfriend asked me what’s wrong with me. I don’t usually laugh that hard watching the news.
Spoke with my brother this weekend. He is in London, and about 18 months ago joined a US law firm at a level where his pay was negotiated in $ not sterling. It has made for a nice little pay cut since he joined…
Who says hostelling is not comfortable? That’s precisely what I plan to do. Make my own food, save money, etc. There is no frickin’ way I could stay in the E120-a-hight hotels the conference organisers were recommending. On the other hand, I’m not going to stay at the fifty-beds-to-a-room ‘mass lodging’ that they also mentioned for E11 a night.
But then, I’ve almost never been able to stay in a hotel and pay for it myself. The last time I did that was, I think, 1984.
I’m going to the Netherlands (flat, bicycles, windmills, etc). E20 a night sounds about right. The most expensive hostel I’ve ever stayed at was in London for L24.95 a night, which, in the way of UK prices siounded quite reasonable until I worked out the math and it was about $60 Canadian. But it was the cheapest decent place I could get in London…
Shame the reported didn’t ask her to show the tag on her shirt that says where it was made! (highly unlikely the shirt was manufactured in the good old US Of A).
London’s a bloody nightmare - hotels here are insane, especially considering what you get for the money. I’ve seen people pay hundreds of pounds for a bloody broom closet; the same thing in the US would be like a Motel 6 with a dead hooker in the mattress.
There’s nothing wrong with most continental European hostels, though, or at least outside of Paris which has a similar problem to London re: cost for value. The price range you mention should be about right, too…
As a person working in the international shipping business, the trade goods certainly seem to be pouring and flying out the door. There are waits of several weeks for space on an outbound vessel. There is a severe shortage of containers for export at every port. Some inland locations you simply can’t get any containers. One of our contract carriers just told us we cannot get any equipment in Houston, at all, for the foreseeable future. Another has placed a complete embargo on all shipments from the west coast because every vessel for the next several months is completely booked and overbooked.
That’s the problem then. Everyone knows you put the dead hooker under the bed. You stash the money in the mattress.
I don’t remember the hostel in Paris being quite that expensive, but then it was in an urban warfare zone and locked its doors at sundown. I wasn’t expecting that, either.
I’m so jealous. sigh