Euro dizzy

Europeans mark the new year by taking a franc look at cultural currency. What's lost in the exchange?

by Theresa Regli

THE FUN STARTED coming to an end on New Year's Eve 1992. I was celebrating the arrival of the new year with friends in a remote village of northeastern France, doing what the French do best: eating. A few minutes before midnight, one friend rose to his feet, cheap vin du table in hand, and offered a halfhearted toast: "In just a few minutes, mes amis, we will no longer be French. We will be European."

The sense of jubilation in the room died down a bit. After all, what could upset a group of Frenchmen more than a new "nationality" lumping them together with those culinarily inept, rude-to-invade-us-so-many-times Germans? But 1993 was the birth year of the modern-day European Union, and there was nothing everyday citizens could do about it.

Two weeks later, I jumped in a car bound for Luxembourg, where I would catch a flight back to America. When I arrived at the border, the customs station was deserted and already in disrepair. Just three weeks earlier, crossing a European border had felt like a scene from an old spy novel: a dashing, slightly intimidating gendarme had emerged from the booth, peered skeptically at my passport, asked me to open the trunk, and demanded to know where I was going and whether I had any farm products. Once the policeman waved me on, I exhaled in relief. I felt I was getting away with something, even if I was just sneaking some cheese from one French-speaking country to another.

But once the calendar flipped to 1993, the only thing at the border was a new flag: a circle of white stars on a field of blue. Just another kilometer marker along the roads of Europe. Suddenly, crossing from France to Luxembourg was about as exciting as driving from Massachusetts to New Hampshire.

That was, in my book, the beginning of the end. The little sovereign country of Luxembourg just didn't seem as cool any more. I'd always had a love affair with Europe, and when I was younger I dreamed of driving from border to border and filling my passport with stamps from every country on the continent. My marks on the bedpost, so to speak.

But in 1993, that dream died.

JANUARY 1, 1999, brought about another major event in the short history of the European Union: the arrival of the ECU, or European Currency Unit, affectionately called the euro. The euro isn't cash yet; for now it will be used only for large transactions, such as bank transfers between countries. Individuals can choose to write checks or make credit-card purchases in euros, or not. Stores are scrambling to list prices in both the "local" and euro currencies. The participating countries' stock markets, now trading in euros, underwent an overhaul so dramatic that a friend of mine who trades stocks in Luxembourg has been preparing for months and worked well into the late hours on New Year's Eve.

Economists, to whom the dawn of the euro is a welcome move toward a new "Euroland" (sounds like an amusement park, doesn't it?), talk about how much easier life will be for travelers. Once the euro becomes hard currency and begins circulating, in 2002, tourists won't have to exchange money (and thus won't pay commissions, and thus won't lose money) when hopping among the 11 participating countries.

The irony, of course, is that this very convenience will make European travel less worthwhile. Part of the fun of Europe -- and a primary reason for my border-to-border dreams -- has always been the complex tapestry of languages, cultures, and, yes, currencies that coexist within astonishingly small distances. With the arrival of the euro, part of that tapestry fades. It means one less difference among the countries of Europe. The euro means no more division or multiplication when I'm in a European restaurant or store as I try to figure out how much "real" money I'm spending. Those calculations may be aggravating, but they're also part of the travel experience. That exchange fee? It's worth it for the novelty.

Ah, the fun of being in Italy and spending 200,000 lira on a meal! That may be the only time in my life I spend 200,000 of any currency on anything. How cool it is to have a pocketful of gold-rimmed 10-franc coins, which make the perfect clink in the accordion case of the musician in the métro. It all feels like play money, because it isn't green, it doesn't fit in my dollar-size wallet, and the bills have a lot more zeros than I'm used to.

A trip across Europe once meant keeping a watchful eye on the ups and downs of many financial markets, and being smart about the days you exchanged money. Timing was essential. I still look back at one day in the late '80s -- a day when I captured nearly 11 French francs to the dollar -- as the Intel-investment moment of my currency-exchange career. The game was to buy high, sell low. Anyone could play.

Now the franc, the lira, the mark, the punt, and others are soon to become artifacts. Over the next three years, they will gradually be phased out; they're slated to become museum pieces on July 1, 2002, when "local" currencies will be accepted no longer. Not only will there be no police at the borders, but those CAMBIO/CHANGE signs will slowly disappear as well. Soon, money clips won't see the action they used to, just as passports haven't since 1993. I can hear myself talking to my grandkids already: "When I was your age, I had to exchange money when I traveled."

DURING THE latter half of 1994 I lived in Grenoble, France, where I witnessed another casualty of modern Europe: yellow headlights.

Yellow headlights were unique to French cars. Legend has it that they were developed during World War II so French soldiers could tell if the vehicle coming toward them was friend or foe. As with the Maginot Line, the Germans ended up benefiting more from such French ingenuity. ("Yellow headlights? Aim, fire!") Nevertheless, yellow headlights continued to be installed in French cars for 50 years after the war. When I drove with French friends in Germany, Belgium, or Luxembourg, they would never fail to point out any car with yellow headlights; they'd sometimes even go so far as to cheer when one passed us on the road. And from a practical standpoint, I always preferred yellow headlights to white ones, because they weren't as glaring when you passed a car at night, and there was no need to polarize your rear-view mirror.

But it was in late 1994 that the word came out of Strasbourg (the seat of the European Council) that for the sake of uniformity, yellow headlights would be phased out. (And they say our Congress wastes time?) There were editorials in many French papers: "White headlights, another threat to our sovereignty." Or worse yet: "A Peugeot just isn't a Peugeot without yellow headlights. Elle n'est plus une voiture française."

Inevitably, yellow headlights began to disappear. When I returned to France in December 1995, they were scarcely to be seen. Yet occasionally over the past couple of years, when driving around remote, vineyard-studded areas of France, I've seen yellow headlights twisting along some ridiculously narrow road in the distance. And that has made me happy.

I HAVE a habit of getting wrapped up in cultural debates with the kind of stubborn Frenchman who responds to a disagreement with "Bah! Americaine!" and a Gallic shrug. I most often get this reaction when I argue that the loss of traditional European traditions--the two-hour lunch break, for example--is not a result of the "American imperialism" they see in the encroachment of our movies, rock music, and fast-food restaurants. In a free country, no cultural tradition disappears if people choose to keep it alive. That's why most Germans still take an afternoon break for kuchen, the Spanish still eat dinner at 10 p.m., the Brits still have teatime, the Irish still have Guinness all the time, and the French still get five to seven weeks of vacation per year (damn them). They refuse to settle for anything less.

And that's part of the reason the British are holding off on the transition to the euro. Not only are they rightfully skeptical that a single currency can work for 11 "states" without a single government to manage it (you could say it's always worked for Italy, but then they're used to chaos); the British are also acknowledging that a currency change means more than just a different type of money. In a recent report on NPR's All Things Considered, a journalist interviewed a London cab driver: "They're telling us there's no room for the queen's figurehead on the money," the cabbie said. "Then it's not my money."

In his defiance, the cabbie makes a point: a country's currency is more than just the means by which it buys and sells goods. It says, "I am of this country. I reflect the pride of the people." The yellow headlights were more than just yellow headlights. They were a distinct branding that said, This is a French car.

European travelers are accustomed to a pocketful of diverse coins, a walletful of colorful bills depicting artists and royalty (or the mystical Marianne) instead of eagles or past presidents. And each bill tells a different story from the country's history.

My mother, a high-school French teacher, includes a lesson every year on the meaning of French money. She shows American bills to students, and asks about Washington, Hamilton, and Lincoln. Then she passes around French bills, and asks about Eiffel, Cézanne, and Debussy. She explains how the French hold their artistic geniuses above their politicians and military heroes. The students are always stunned, she says, because they'd never thought to imagine Mark Twain or Ernest Hemingway on a US dollar.

My favorite currency art is that on the French 50-franc bill. It depicts beloved author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who was also a World War II airline pilot, with his world-famous sketch of le petit prince. Like a warm, crusty baguette morsel topped with Camembert, the bill is far more French than it could ever be European.

I saved one of those bills. And even though I have more than three years to spend it, I can't imagine I ever will.