[travel] Wicked moneychangers

Every city I've been to in Eastern Europe is full of small moneychanging booths. Most of them offer horrifically bad exchange rates but disguise these rates via confusing rate charts. Some of them take as much as 30% off of the transaction. If we assume the same number of customers, these shady shops pull in 10x as much money as the banks that offer the same services. Their cost of doing business is practically nothing – they just need to rent a tiny bit of real estate and pay one person to man the booth. Thus it must be an extremely profitable business... every few minutes a tourist comes in, and the exchange earns somewhere between $10 and $100. In these areas, where salaries are a fraction of what they are in the US, this is a lot of money. There are several of these things per block in touristy areas and there's never a line... I see them and wish the space could be put to better use other than as traps to fleece the uninformed.

While I am against regulation in a lot of areas (and my libertarian friends even more so) his is the sort of thing where I would rather have the government step in to prevent the formation of businesses that do nothing productive, hurt their country's reputation, and clutter up valuable downtown real estate. Of course the government curently stands to profit (at least in the short run) from these things, so they would lose some tax revenue when they are replaced by somewhat less profitable businesses.

[travel] Intuitive yardsticks

Speaking of math and money, a lot of people seem to have a poor intuitive sense for numbers. Given I've had to switch currencies every few days (I'm up to 17 currencies), it's been interesting to watch how I assimilate new units of measure. I have to use each currency unit of measure at least a dozen times every day, so I get a lot of practice. At first, I usually find some quick conversion trick that turns it into dollars. Most of the time it's simple (eg divide by 10, divide by 3 etc) but with more complicated ones I can usually turn it into two easy steps. For example, in Lithuania, I had to divide by 2.5 to get dollars, but it was much easier to divide by 10 and then quadruple it. After a couple of days in each country, I notice that I don't need to translate anymore except for unusual items. What seems to be happening is that my mind starts putting reference values in place (eg in Prague a nice meal usually costs 150-200, a good museum should be 100, beer should be 20 etc). It's not a declarative memory in that I usually experience this knowledge when I'm looking at a price and get an intuitive sense for how cheap or expensive it is.

The same has happened with Celsius. I now know 0 is freezing. 10 is a very chilly day, 20 is pleasantly cool, 30 is quite warm, and 40 was me baking in the Sahara. I now tie the Celsius number directly to a sense of how much clothing I should put on. This actually took a month to develop since I only would have to think about a temperature once every few days. So at least for me, it seems that it takes about 20-30 mental conversions to build up an intuitive sense for a new measurement of a familiar quantty.

Anyway, back to other people. While some people seem reasonably talented, I've noticed that others employ various strategies to avoid having to do any math in their heads. For example, they will get what they determine to be, say $200 from an ATM or exchange, and then just buy things they want, watching to see how quickly their $200 disappears. Others keep asking local merchants if they can pay in dollars or euros. One woman I met simply bought a package tour so she could just pay once for everything and wouldn't have to figure anything out.

It's unclear how useful this particular skill is, long term. People can simply use calculators on their phones to translate a value on an unfamiliar scale to a familiar scale. (though you'll look quite uncool in a bar if you're punching numbers in to find out what all the drinks cost).* Other skills are like this too -- once everyone has GPS and Google Maps in their pocket, having a good sense of direction is a lot less important. However, I think there's still a lot of value in having a good intuitive ability to manipulate numbers in general. The art of taking an unfamiliar set of numbers and knowing what to do with them to make sense of them is something you can't let a calculator handle for you.

*While you can to some degree outsource your math and navigation tasks to a bit of technology, you can't do the same with your social skills or your ability to write witty emails.

[travel] Awesome public transit

In the US, cities that went through big growth spurts prior to 1920 or so (New York, Washington DC, Boston) have excellent public transit, while those that bloomed later (LA, Houston etc) have dismal public transit. This is in part due to the rise of the automobile and the construction with cities with the focus on cars as the primary means of transport.

However, it seems that in Europe, public transit is *especially* good in cities that had their growth spurts prior to 1920 *and* were subject to Communism. Communism effectively held off private car ownership for an extra 50 years.

Budapest and Prague both had amazingly efficient systems, especially given their small size. Subway trains are often less than a minute apart, and there's an excellent surface tram system to supplement the subways.

Amusingly, the people of Budapest never learned the "walk on the left, stand on the right" principle of escalators. Instead, they *all* stand, and some of the escalator rides are over three minutes long. In Prague everyone neatly segregates even when there's a huge crowd funneling in.