The illusion of cheap

This Friday it's rent day again and so I just transferred a substantial amount of money into my landlord's account. Ouch, that really hurt! For the umpteenth time since I moved to London my account balance is flashing at me in big red numbers. It's an unfortunate combination to be unemployed, enrolled in a scandalously expensive school and living in the most expensive city in Europe (well, not counting Moscow apparently). I won't scare you with the exact amount of rent I pay for my room in this house that I'm sharing with 4 others, but suffice it to say there is a reason they tend to quote rent prices per week rather than per month in this town.

That London is an expensive city can't be a surprise to anyone. Living in it has had a weird effect on my personal perception of money though. When you go on holiday to a country with another currency you tend to look up the exchange rates beforehand. Once arrived you probably spend a good part of your vacation converting the prices of your souvenirs into more familiar currency. Moving to that country is a different matter I have found. The thing is that many costs are unavoidable anyway. You simply do need to buy groceries and you do have to pay that rent, there is nothing you can do about that. And so, after some time, you stop converting Pounds into Euros. After all, what would be the point? The thing is that by no longer converting them, in my mind's eye the two have become equivalent so I end up quite happily forking out 20 Pounds as if they were 20 Euros...and that's where the trouble begins! A few weeks ago, for instance, I was at this club with some of my flatmates and decided that I should treat myself to a special drink and I ordered a Mojito. This drink, consisting of some ordinary ice cubes, a bit of sugar, mint, lime and a fairly small amount of rum cost me the dear sum of ₤8.50! At that time, I didn't think much of it. Later on though, after the alcoholic haze had lifted, I started doing the math and realised I had just not only paid €13 for a single drink but that this in fact equated to 28 good old-fashioned guilders... Now that's one expensive drink! I don't know what you would pay for this same drink in a bar at the Leidseplein these days, it might not even be all that different, but my point is more that I have stopped REALISING how much money it really is.

This arithmetical self-delusion even goes as far as to have me believing things are cheaper over here than at home. At the moment 1 Pound more or less equals 1.5 Euros. Perhaps if the cost of living in Amsterdam or London would be about the same this ratio would be big enough to stand out. It would, for instance, be very clear that a ₤5 lunch is something very different from a €5 lunch. The thing is though, that because London is about 1.3 times more expensive than Amsterdam(1) the prices you see actually do look a lot like Euro prices. But just that little bit LOWER... and so the illusion is complete: London is cheaper! I guess that might help explain my current cash flow trouble.


(1) Look it up for yourself at http://www.mercerhr.com/pressrelease/details.jhtml?idContent=1142150)