Dinars and Sense

Learning the money of another country is the one of the first and most obvious difficulties when travelling.  Nothing makes you feel more like a foreigner than standing at a register to pay for something small and having to turn over each and every coin to identify its worth.  If you're like me, you are probably imagining that the clerk wants nothing more than to reach over grab the correct change out of your hand to speed the process along! 

Here in Tunisia, I've found it even more difficult than usual and I think it's because they use 3 decimal places here instead of 2.  The Tunisian unit of money is the dinar.  That is broken up into millimes.  One hundred millemes is expressed in decimals as 00,100 (they use a comma instead of a decimal point) and there is a 100 millime and 500 millime coin.  Then there are 50 millime, 20 millime and 10 millime coins.  (I haven't seen anything smaller, so I'm not sure exactly why there are 3 decimal places; I just know there are.) 

Now 3 decimal places instead of 2 might not seem like a big deal, so let me try to explain this by giving an example.  On my last trip to the grocery store, the total bill was 18090.  (It shows up with no decimal places on the screen.)  My brain automatically supplies the decimal as 180.90, and then has to convert it to 18.090.  Then I have the normal "foreigner" experience of trying to sift through the change in my hand. 

I know by the end of my time here, I'll be handing out change with no problem, but right now it's just  one big thing that constantly makes me feel like I stick out as a foreigner.  Well...that and the inability to speak either Arabic or French, but I'll save that for another post...