The Big Change has swept through

Europe. Twelve countries, "300 million people" have switched

to the new European Union currency, the euro. I can picture the locals

pondering their palms, making mental calculations as we tourists have

for years.

When we first traveled to

Germany in the mid-1980s, our daughter Mary became impatient with us for

persistently doing the math before we made purchases. But when the menu

says lunch is going to cost 20DM, I'm going to enjoy it a whole lot more

if I figure out that it will be a little less than $9 by the time my Visa

bill taps my savings account. That's still more than I'd spend at home.

"Just get used to German

prices," Mary insisted, and maybe I could have if we had stayed in

Germany the whole time we were in Europe. Our habit, however, is to make

Mary's Gelsenkirchen apartment our base and roam the continent from there.

That meant shifting gears at each border to recalculate the worth of a

dollar and avoid paying too much by accident.

What goes around comes around,

as folk wisdom has it, and now Mary and millions of Germans, Belgians,

Greeks, Italians, Austrians, Finns and Luxembourgers, as well as the Portuguese,

French, Irish, Spanish and Dutch, get to feel like financial illiterates

without leaving their neighborhood bistros or outdoor markets.

Prices have been marked in

euros as well as in the local currency for more than a year to give people

a sense of the euro's worth. The official changeover took place Jan. 1,

with the euro equaling roughly two Deutschmarks. A month later Mary was,

at least briefly, enjoying the perceived "reduced" prices.

"The old prices are listed,

often, in DM, then the new price in Euro, then the marked-down [after-Christmas

sale] price," she wrote. "Since the Euro is about two Marks,

everything looks like an incredible bargain!"

I see she's got her own shorthand

conversion mastered, the way I did to compare dollars and marks. "Everything

written in Euros is half the price it was in Marks. My haircut yesterday

was 15 Euros (instead of 30 DM) and I tipped one-and-a-half Euros."

The euro is worth about 88

U.S. cents, so that 15-euro haircut would have cost us just over $13.

Incidentally, the English pronunciation

seems to be "YOO-row," although the Irish are the only English-speaking

nation to adopt it. Mary, and I presume other German-speakers, pronounce

it "OY-row," in accordance with German rules of pronunciation.

Lord knows how the French say it.

May take awhile before everyone

settles on pronunciation and punctuation. In English, euro is not capitalized,

but its official abbreviation is EUR, all caps. In German all nouns are

capped; when I quote Mary, I guess I should write as she does, "Euro"

and "Mark."

The euro is divided into 100

cents, like the dollar. I haven,t heard "cent" pronounced yet.

Is it universally "sent" as English would have it, or the nasal

"sahn" the French would say, or does it depend on where you

are?

The colorful official euro

Web site www.euro.ecb.int/en.html has lots of interesting information

on the new system. For instance, the seven banknotes, as Europeans call

paper money, are printed alike for the entire European Union.

On the face of each, the 12

stars of the European Union appears on a background of windows and gateways

depict "the European spirit of openness and cooperation," the

Web site says. The reverse has a bridge, symbolizing "the close cooperation

and communication between Europe and the rest of the world." No dead

emperors and queens here.

Each note is a different color,

features a different period of architecture, and is sized to represent

its value. For example, the EUR 5 is the smallest (EUR 1 and Eur 2 are

coins) and is gray, with classical architecture. The largest, the EUR

500, is purple and has modern 20th century architecture. The EUR 10, 20,

50, 100, and 200 are, respectively, red, blue, orange, green and yellow-brown,

and architecturally reflect Romanesque, gothic, renaissance, baroque and

rococo, and iron and glass.

Commendably, the sizing and

colors were designed to make it easier for the visually-impaired to sort

their banknotes. An imbedded holographic strip helps make the bills resistant

to counterfeiting. The eight denominations of coins are not only sized

for identification, but have varying colors, thickness, and milled edges

according to value: 1, 2, 5, 10, 20,

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