Göteborg/Gothenburg Over the last three weeks I've flipped back and forth between four different currencies.. (Canadian dollar, Euro, Czech crown, and today the Swedish crown). As a result I've set aside my usual food/daily budget and quartered it. Before I got here I tried to find out as much as I could about the price of things. The first thing I usually do in any country I've never visited before is check out the local mini-marts, corner stores, flyers, posters, anything with prices on them. Especially what the older ones have in the check out lines. This usually tells me two things.. the immediate value of the currency, and a reasonable baseline to work from in figuring out everything else out. Airports and tourist districts rip you off everywhere, that's a given, but a baseline definitely helps weed out the obscenely over priced stuff (tourist district or not). Today SEK 12 (31,-Kč) will buy you a box of pastilles from the corner store or super market. In a tourist district or hotel snackbar it will cost you SEK 22 (56,-Kč). A little over one and a half times as much.. (above) My food and drink budget goal this week is to only spend about 250,-Kč in Göteborg. How? Well, I brought my own :) Mostly things from the supermarket that are sealed, portable, and don't require refrigeration. Ironically I did this four years ago with my first visit to the Czech Republic. Little did I know (at the time) that Czech prices were one of the lowest in Eastern/Central Europe. This morning, at the last minute, I snagged a few more perishables on the way to the airport. I'm glad I did. They are now sitting outside on my window ledge (a perfect makeshift refrigerator at this time of year :)