The Sixteen Euro Bellini

The U.S. may be the last great superpower but you wouldn’t know if from the exchange rate. It seems that all of Europe has chosen to comment on our international politics with the one thing we Yanks understand: money.

This was all too clear on a recent jaunt to Italy. The U.S. dollar stood at a dismal $1.26 to the euro. My sister and I had planned a “budget” trip, just a few steps above the poor exchange student that I was 20 years ago. We knew prices were higher than in the States, but the dollar’s daily slide against the euro hit us like sticker shock.

I’d booked us into an 80 euro per night hotel in Mestre, a middle-class town just outside of Venice. It was still low season, but even one star and no star double rooms in Venice proper were over 200 euros per night. A one euro bus ride from Mestre would give us the Grand Canal plus a quiet, comfortable sleep in a room with cable TV and private bath with a hair dryer. My sister, the corporate traveler on whose frequent flyer miles we had flown, was grumpy about the location. All this frugality had to be rewarded somehow and she decided it would be on Bellinis at Harry’s Bar In Venice on the Grand Canal.

Well, that was our Alamo, our Saigon, our Tikrit. Sixteen euros for a peach juice and champagne cocktail. After drinking one apiece, neither of us felt a buzz. We were sober enough to do the math: At that day’s exchange rate each Bellini had cost $22.46. We scurried out of Harry’s, regretting whatever Yankee arrogance or stupidity had led us there in the first place.

From then on, the Bellini became our point of reference for everything. In Mestre, we indulged in three course dinners with wine, proclaiming “This whole meal cost less than that Bellini.” An ornate Venetian mask was just “a few more euros than a Bellini.” Laced espadrille shoes were “cheaper than a Bellini.” We calculated our cab fare and tip to the airport at “about two Bellinis.”

Last week , my sister called me from a bar in Half Moon Bay, a sort of Mestre to our hometown, San Francisco. She informed me that she was looking out at the wide blue ocean and drinking a Bellini that cost less than half of what we’d paid in Venice. And yes, this time, she was buzzed.