Last Dong Day

Today's my last day in Vietnam before flying to China tomorrow morning. That means I will be starting to spend Chinese Yuan instead of Vietnamese Dong, something which should be a lot easier to work out because it's roughly Y10 to £1 instead of a whopping 32,400 Dong to £1 (roughly). I am a lot better at dividing by 10 than I am at dividing by 32,400!

In The Photo: While it's only possible to get 5, 10, 20 and 50 notes at home, here in Vietnam you can carry round a few half a million notes like this! You can even go to a cash machine and withdraw a few million Dong!

No Cents. No Sense

Australian money makes no sense! They have; $2, $1, 50c, 20c, 10c and 5c coins just like the UK has those coins in pounds and pence but they have no 1 or 2 cent coins. It was the same in New Zealand.

This might not seem too odd as you'd just expect prices to be round numbers, but no! Things in shops still have prices like $4.99 etc and when you get to the till they just round it up and if your shopping came to something like $12.43 they'll round it down! Why not just have 1 or 2 cent coins or price things in round numbers?!? Bizarre.

Also, the 50c coins here are HUGE!

Hello Ma'am

Look who I found on the money in New Zealand! The Queen appears on the money here because New Zealand is part of the Commonwealth. That's a group of over 50 countries (Most of whom were in The British Empire) that share lots of things like good trade and our queen, Elizabeth II, is the current head of The Commonwealth.

It also makes me feel more at home!

730 Times Table Anyone?

Just arrived safely in Santiago, Chile and it seems really nice but it might take me the two days we are here to try and understand the money: There are about 730 Chilean peso to £1!

This means everything looks mega expensive as they use the dollar symbol too...I just brought a regular sized drink and the price was $1029!

It also means that I need to divide every price I see by 730 to work out it's cost in pounds. I can't say I did much dividing by that at school.

An entertaining, maths filled couple of days lie ahead for my brain!