A pence. A pound. A quid. A what?

Money makes the world go around. It's sad, but true. Over the past week or so I've become very aware of money. Which is good in some ways since it's a lesson I need to learn.

The first thing that I'm still trying to learn is all about the British currency system. There's the pence, which is the equivalent of a penny. Then a pound, one hundred pence, which is the equivalent of a dollar. Then there's a quid. It took my a while to figure out what exactly that is. I even googled it and learned that it's slang for a pound. Basically like us calling it a buck.

Another thing I'm still trying to sort out is which coin is which and which bill is which. It doesn't help that in my wallet I still have American coins and Euro coins mixed in with the British coins. What I'm doing so far (and it's working) is trying to count the coins out, handing it to the clerk and telling them, "I hope that's right". They have pence coins, 5p coins, 10p coins, 20p coins, 50p coins, 1 pound coins, and 2 pound coins. It's all very confusing and tricky.

A piece of advice that we received at orientation in Chicago was to not convert the price of things into dollars. This has proven very difficult for me, but I'm trying to get better at since it'll make me feel not as bad about spending so much money. The exchange is currently about 1 pound for $2.16. So for everything you buy, double it, add a little more and that's about what you're spending! I bought a birthday card the other day and it was cheaper that what I spent on postage to the States. I saw a rain jacket yesterday for 140 pounds. Double that and it's close to $300. For a rain jacket. But fortunately another store was having a 50% off sale, so I bought a brand new rain jacket for 29 pounds. That's even cheap in the States!

My last struggle is with having money and not having money. The ELCA sent us off with $100 to last us till our first stipend is paid. Well when we got here that was only 40 pounds. To last a whole month. It's gone already. I have more money of my own, but I'm trying really hard to save that for traveling--however, my pretty new raincoat did come out of my bank account. Our first stipend comes in Sept. 20 and I'm very excited, even though it won't be a lot of money. It'll be interesting to see how I can survive by only getting money once a month. Stay tuned to see how well I succeed at this endeavor. I'm excited to learn how to challenge myself to live simply and this definitely helps!!!