Making excuses, the European edition

The exchange rate, along with my schoolyear-only stipend and the impending cost of a new (Manhattan, fingers crossed) apartment, makes me frugal indeed while away. The way I deal with the euro is not to calculate what each purchase would be in dollars, but just to set a higher standard than I normally would for what’s a necessary purchase. I think of euros, then, as really big dollars, or just shift my cheapness up a degree, and that seems to amount to what a more mathematical approach would. That, and I eat a lot of wheat bread and this bland but strangely addictive Austrian cheese.

The one place I make an exception and lose all sense of euros is at the café. When it comes to cappuccinos, which I rarely order at home, here I see a "2" next to the item and simply must have one. Cappuccinos in NY are rarely below the $3 mark, so it's like I'm getting a deal! I know rationally that a 2-something euro cappuccino is not in fact cheaper – or much cheaper – than its NY equivalent, but for whatever reason, for this item, I decide it’s acceptable to pretend a euro is just a dollar, nothing more. Part of it could be that here, there’s less of a gap between what a regular coffee costs and what a fancy one does – anything purchased on the outside is by definition fancy, and sometimes a person is outside and in need of a coffee, and with an upgrade so simple... Or maybe it’s that caffeinated purchases are work aids, or can be justified as such, and for whatever reason the books on my orals lists keep being 500 pages long. It could also be that here, whole milk is a given, and cappuccinos really are better with whole than skim. But in all honesty, I think it comes down to two being a smaller number than three.