If you don't, you could (purely hypothetically) find yourself:
- arriving in town on Friday night after banks have closed for the weekend
- discovering that ATMs won't take your card
- buying bagfuls of food from a convenience store because they take credit cards for purchases over 10 dollars
- crying in frustration because you want to call home and, though convenience stores take credit cards, you can't use credit to buy phone cards
- as a last resort, pleading tearily and dramatically to the young man working in a divey internet cafe to let you use the internet to contact your mother who must be sick with worry by now (this works, actually)
- realize you must have left your travellers checks home, somehow
- having FINALLY set up a bank account and changed money, discovered that your tuition is already due and you have exactly 73 dollars to get you through the next, say, 2 weeks.
No really, don't wire money. I'll be fine. :D But it does make a good story.
1 comment:
Very good advice!!! Before I went to Europe last year, I called my bank to make sure that my ATM card would be accepted abroad. But when I got to the airport in London - *none* of the machines would take my card. I nearly had a panic attack. I had about $5 in change and used one of those machines that charges like 40% to change your change. So I had all of like 2 pounds to get me from the airport into the city. Fortunately the currency exchange place did take my debit card, and I was able to get some money... but it was a very scary experience. And that's in a situation where I spoke the language. I'm sure it was much scarier in Korea!
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