Copenhagen is the fourth most expensive city in Europe, and that is being reflected in my pocket book. Within the first few weeks I managed to spend close to $900 CDN, but that is to be expected when moving to a new place and needing to buy essentials (food, phone, hair products, transportation, etc.) and pay for accomodations at the hostel I stayed for the first three nights.
It took me a while to get my bank account set up and by the time that I did (and was able to transfer money from my Canadian account) I was out of all of the cash that I had brought and was actually borrowing from friends. I didn't realize how much money is worth until I was broke. Now that I have an account opened, I'm doing just fine - all I have to do is conserve my money to ensure that I will have enough to last me the whole time that I am here and still allow me to do all of the travelling that I want to do. I'm thinking that a job might be a good thing to get, since I don't have a lot of class time at the moment (only on Monday's and Wednesday's) I could easily fit it into my schedule. The fact that I can't speak Danish (beyond telling people where I live, what my name is, how many languages I can speak, and where I am from) might prove to be a little bit of a barrier though.
It took me a while to get used to the currency here. One Canadian dollar is 5.076 Danish kroner, which means that at first glance, everything looks incredibly expensive!! 120 kroner meals sounds expensive, until I do the mental math and realize that it is only $24-ish Canadian dollars. Living here has helped me become good at simple, mental math: constantly dividing by 5; subtracting 12 for the 24 clock that they use; and, subtracting by 6 to figure out what time it is back in Canada so I know whether anyone will be awake to skype!
20, 10, 5, 2, 1, 0.50 Danish coins
And getting used to the money was a little bit difficult as well, but I think that I have it under control now! In Canada our biggest coin is $2, here it is 20kr (about $4 CDN) so I always have a lot of change on me here. In Denmark the bills are 1000, 500, 200, 100, and 50. The coins are 20, 10, 5, 2, 1, and 0.50. And if something at the store costs 180.27kr, for example, they will round it up to 180.50, which at first I didn't like, but then I realized that I was really only loosing like $0.004 CDN so it's not the end of the world!
that's so crazy that they round it up!
ReplyDeletewhat are the 3 most expensive cities in Europe?
As of 2009 it is Oslo, Zurich, and Copenhagen
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