If you are a frequent international traveller, how do you handle your money?

Are you able to get into the mindset of the local populace as your plane touches down and figure out their currency and the look of all those notes and small change?

Or do you continue to cling in your head to the currency of the place you originate from and puzzle over the differently coloured notes, turning them this way and that to read the denominations with care — making it apparent to even the most inexperienced salesperson that you have no idea of the value of the money in your purse?

And — this is the tricky part — once you have figured out what those fives and tens and fifties and hundreds look like, are you able to spend as the locals do? Can you really consider a £1 note just £1 and not a hundred rupees plus, can you comment ‘What a bargain!’ in a one-to-ten-dirham shopping mart without multiplying that one dirham to ten dirhams by sixteen plus and then comparing each item with what it costs back in India or in your home country?

Or do you linger (like I do, to the disgust of my shopping companions), before each item on the shelf or on the rack and rapidly do your mental arithmetic or pull out the calculator, if you’re carrying one, and work out to the last rupee what you would pay for it? Do you then consider — and reconsider — whether you really need it and it is something you must get or whether it can wait and be added to your ‘one day I will acquire’ list?

I have never ceased to marvel at fellow travellers who, from the moment they land on foreign soil, start thinking and acting in euros or dollars or dirhams without blinking. I wish it could be as simple for all of us: that we could walk blithely into a mall or gas station anywhere in Europe and toss some three or four euros onto the counter for a cup of coffee and not convert it into rupees and think, ‘Wow, 320 rupees for a cup of coffee! Maybe I don’t need a caffeine pick-me-up that is going to set me back so much!’

Of course, if you do this, you’re most likely going to be labelled a cheapskate — and you will never hear the end of it. For, among your ‘nearest and dearest’ are bound to be some who never count the change on home soil and refuse to convert currency to rupees when they are in foreign lands.

Red flag

But, old habits die hard, and with each trip abroad you will find that your ability to multiply (or sometimes, very rarely, divide) improves by leaps and bounds and in the same space of time that it takes someone else to decide on whether they would prefer a slice of red velvet or blueberry cheesecake, the conversion is done in your head, the red flag is raised and a firm ‘No thanks’ to either follows.

Sadly for those I venture abroad with, I fall into the category of traveller that takes more than a little time to settle down and start thinking in the local currency. It is only somewhere on the fifth or sixth day of any trip that I leave the Indian rupee behind and become less of rapid converter and a little more spontaneous in my spending.

Thankfully, that is also just about as long as our usual holidays last — and thus we are able to get back home before our purses are cleaned out! Perhaps for those of us who convert and turn away, there is money left to travel another day.

— CHERYL RAO is a journalist based in India.