JuicyCat

a second entry

juicycat — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 07:49:00 GMT

By now, five summers after the dollar began its long swoon against the euro and the pound, American travelers are used to $5 cups of coffee and triple-digit dinner checks in Europe’s great capitals. But the dollar’s latest plunge — to record lows of 72 cents to the euro and 49 pence to the pound — has turned mere sticker shock into a form of disbelief for many tourists.

For Kaelon Kroft, a custodian from San Bernardino, Calif., it was the cost of Coke that shocked him most in Paris. “We just paid 9.50 euros for a can of Coke at a cafe,” he said. “At our hotel, the bar was serving a glass of Coke for four euros.”

“That’s over five bucks,” his wife Kristi added. Actually, at the current exchange rate, it is a fizzy bubble or two over $5.50.

Gallery: test at home

juicycat — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 06:56:00 GMT

test

The first entry

juicycat — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 06:51:00 GMT

This is a test for our first entry.

Same with the New York Stock Exchange (sorry, no adding busts of Google's founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin) or the Tweed Courthouse (carving hieroglyphs into the pillars is prohibited).

But nobody needs to alert visitors to their presence. They're visible from afar, and you're hardly likely to miss them unless fog rolling in off the Atlantic becomes very, very thick.

The city's smaller landmarks, though, are harder to spot, hidden on side streets that most visitors would only wander down by chance, or camouflaged by the more ordinary (and often taller) buildings that surround them. You'd walk past many of them unless you happened to stop right across the street, then suddenly took a 90-degree turn.

http://www.nytimes.com/