Harumph! <clearing throat>

Well... the actual implementation of changing over to the Euro from the Deutschmark went pretty smoothly. The result on inflation, however, was huge. Roughly speaking, it was a 2 marks:1 euro conversion. Many stores, however, used it as an opportunity to hike up their prices. For months, newspapers were writing stories and people were sending in examples of items that had doubled in price overnight. Best example was a small hardware chain that seemed to have simply replaced "marks" with the Euro symbol but left the numbers all the same, so a hammer that had been 9 marks was now 9 euros.

I was living in Switzerland at the actual time of conversion, near the border to Austria and not too far away from Germany, too. The most obvious difference for me was that all of a sudden my favourite Swiss mall parking lot was filled with Austrian and even German cars. It used to be that the Swiss would go to Austria or Germany to shop because many things were cheaper. Now it is the other way around.

Let's just say that I go back and visit my friends in Switzerland quite a few times a year.