Monday, September 07, 2009

Legoland 2 - Still Can't Get Enough!

Our holiday to Denmark (and Legoland) was just too much fun to limit to one posting, so I'm going to start raving about it again.
After all, we are still in serious Lego mode here; the boys have had me putting together all their Lego toys in a non-stop marathon since we arrived home, resulting in me re-discovering many rarely used muscles I had forgotten I actually possessed since the last Lego marathon which I described here. Now that the creidt card bills have rolled in we've also been able to confirm our suspicions - Denmark is a pretty expensive place. It didn't help that it isn't part of the Euro zone, a small detail which had completely escaped me until the day before we were to leave when hubby suggested we go through the Money Drawer to see if we had any Danish Kroners. Any what? You mean we have to change money? Inside Europe?? Bugger.
After rummaging through our money drawer, I happily found a small stock of Kronies to take with us. The Money Drawer used to get a lot more use, but since we all became part of Euro land, the number of envelopes stuffed with currencies have diminished somewhat. There is always a handful of British pounds, since hubby travels back and forth between Aberdeen and Amsterdam every month, and a stack of Swedish Kroner for the annual visits to his sister in Uppsala. Then there is of course a wad of Kiwi dollars, some Norwegian thingies (Kroner again? How unoriginal) for business trips to Stavanger, and a pile of Singaporean dollars which is sadly depleted after my last stopover. Other that that there are what we call the orphan currencies; bits and bobs from Indonesia, Malaysia, South Africa, the US and a couple of other places we'll probably not get back to for a long time. However I digress - we at least had some Danish Krondongs.
Now I don't know about any of you, but doing currency exchanges in my head is not a natural talent. Euro to New Zealand or Singaporean dollar? No problem, the rate is always about 1:2. But Danish Kring-alings? Those suckers trade at 7.3 to the euro, and who the hell can work that out?? Let's just suffice to say I would suck 2,500 of them out of an ATM every second day and they seemed to disappear at an alarming rate. It didn't help that our new credit cards which we hadn't requested didn't work (thanks ING bank!). Our Postbank was recently taken over by the ING bank and our perfectly working pale blue credit cards were prematurely swapped for hideous bright orange ones which only work with a pin number. Nice move guys, just when we're about to go on holiday, too! Feeling like complete dinosaurs, neither of us knew our pin number, having always just signed for purchases in the past. Hence the 10,000 Koronas-a-week habit we developed on holiday.
On the bright side, having only a vague idea as to how rapidly we were depleting our daily account did help to curb any leanings towards holiday splurges, with the exception of boxes of Lego of course. At the end of the day, the chance to get away from reality for two weeks made it all worth while. And we still have some Kro-magnons left in the Money Drawer.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks For This Blog, was added to my bookmarks.