Rupees

I realize I'm starting to talk a lot about rupees. In case you don't know, the rupee is the functional name of Indian currency. Today, 10 January 2007 at 13:46, 44.48 rupees is equal to 1 US dollar. Oppositely, one rupee is equal to 2.25 cents of one US dollar. You can look for yourself at www.xe.com/ucc to find the most current exchange rate for any currency you can think of.

Here are some facts I've learned about rupees.
1) Until very recently, to exchange any other currency to rupees, you had to have a receipt proving you went through the proper sources. Then you would use that receipt to exchange your money back to dollars (see number 2, below). There was a lot of fraudulent activities going on with money exchange. With the advent of the ATM, however, things have changed. We can simply walk up and get money now any time of day or night. The campus has an ATM, however I haven't seen any in town yet. They certainly don't jump out at you. I think you can get money still at banks and maybe at the mall. Fortunately, at the mall they are eager to take our credit card. So far, we feel confident using our card there. In smaller places, it might be a different story.
2) It is illegal to take rupees out of India (according to two sources, although both are a bit out of date...things change so quickly around here!). So, I'll have to give you a link to wikipedia so you can see the rupees, as I probably won't be bringing any home.
3) Indian counting is very different from our western style: two words are commonly used, although I doubt any of our transactions will get us using these words fluently. A lakh is 100 thousand (written 1,00,000) and a crore is 10 million (written 1,00,00,000). Hello! These groupings of two instead of three are more than I can handle. And I thought it was hard to adjust in Europe to the period replacing the comma and the comma replacing the period (ie 4.321,00 instead of 4,321.00)!!!
4) When paying with a large bill (100 and 500 bills are all that come out of the ATM), people shake their head and ask if you have anything smaller. This is especially amusing on campus, because we go from the ATM straight to the convenience store. They don't like to make change. We don't have anything but large bills. I don't know how we manage! Three times already we've had to go back later to pay the 2 or 6 rupees we owed because they didn't want to take our larger bills. If we can just figure out where to make change, we'll be happy to count out every single rupee...

The wikipedia website for the rupee is quite interesting. Just go to www.wikipedia.org and type in Indian rupee for your search. I think you'll like it!