Nancy Local Custom Tips by tini58de Top 5 Page for this destination

They really miss their old currency!

Coming from Germany I know how difficult it is to change from your native currency to the European currency EURO, but well, quite a few countries had to get used to that! I found it quite amusing, though, to see how much the French still stick to their former Franc:

we did see the most obscure price tags, like 3,27 € - something that must convert into 10 FF or 13,88 € (which once was probably around 40 FF) instead of the usual 4,99 € or 20 € or so!

The funniest thing that struck me was the way that parking meters were "converted" into Euro measures: since there were no odd money measures possible, they did it the other way around and charged an even amount of Euro for a very specific amount of time: 30 cents for 29 minutes or 1,50 € for 1 h 56 minutes!!!

Licence plates

There is a system to the French license plates:

to find out where the car was registered you have to look at the last two digits of the license plate. They correspond with the first two digits of the zip (postal) code of the area where the car is from. In Nancy for instance you will mostly find cars with a 54 as the last two numbers on the license plate, since the postal code of Nancy is 54000. The Alsace has 67, further south you find the 68 and so on - it is fun to track down the origins of the cars this way!

Dogs

People in Nancy seem to like dogs - and people!!! We did see quite a bit of evidence that dogs are cherished - they even have their own walking lanes!!! I have never seen anything like that before!

On the other hand people are being protected from dog poop - you find boxes with plastic bags (so called canisacs) all over the place! Very useful for dog poop disposal! I do not know if there is a fine for not removing your dog's "leftovers", but I could very well imagine that there is!

And hey, doesn't that little doggie look cute?