by My third week in Romania has just begun. I’m in Cluj and there’s a deluge. It’s huge. So, with the ugly weather outside, now would be a good time to give some practical information about travelling and getting by in Romania.
This post is about physical money. You need considerably less of it in Romania than in most Western European countries, or New Zealand where I’ve just come from, and that’s a big part of the reason I’m here. To make life a bit more interesting, Romania doesn’t use the euro. Its currency is the leu, which means “lion”. The leu is divided into 100 bani. The plural of leu is lei, pronounced “lay”. There are currently about five lei to the pound, or four to the US dollar. Bani, incidentally, is also the Romanian word for money itself. Romania went through a period of rampant inflation (don’t you just love the word “rampant”?) and in 2005, when the currency seemed to have stabilised, 10,000 old lei became one new leu. The currency code for the new leu is RON, and sometimes you’ll see prices given as, say, “10 RON”. Some tourists have been duped into thinking the RON and the leu are two different currencies.
Romanian money is note-heavy: the smallest note is 1 leu, worth just 20p. That’s the complete opposite of what I remember from my childhood: the pound note was eliminated when I was very small, making the smallest note the fiver, so I hardly ever touched a note until I was a teenager, except when I lived in New Zealand where $1 and $2 notes were still in use. The largest Romanian note is 500 lei which you wouldn’t want to lose; it’s worth more than the biggest American bill. Every denomination of note or coin begins with a 1 or a 5 with the exception of the 200 lei note. The lack of intermediate values like 2 or 20, and the relative lack of coins, seem to be a hangover from the old “rampant” currency. The notes are identical in size to euro notes, presumably so vending machines and the like can be easily converted when Romania switches over to the euro, but I can’t see that happening in the next few years. Although the 5 and 10 lei notes are a bit too similar to my eyes, all the notes are nice to look at, with each one featuring a famous Romanian figure. The coins, what few there are, could certainly have been a bit less boring.
Prices are given to the nearest ban (0.01 leu) but totals are rounded when you come to pay. Unlike New Zealand, there doesn’t seem to be a standard for rounding, even in individual stores. Some places round everything up, and even though we’re only talking about a couple of pence here and there, I don’t like the message that sends out.
I hated the whole rigmarole of tipping when I visited the US last year. It became my second most despised thing about America, right behind guns. The Romanian word for “tip” is “bacșiș”, which comes from Turkish. I’ve hardly been in any restaurants, so I don’t know what the protocol there is. Taxi drivers seem to expect a small “rounding up” tip, but also try to scam the bejeesus out of you, especially in Bucharest.
From what I’ve seen so far, cash is king here. I’ve stayed at two places so far that have only accepted cash. I’m guessing that’s some kind of tax dodge.
This rain is really rampant now.
