Buffalo Coin

Hello All.

So we have entered the twentieth century (albeit a little bit late) and are now excited to have our own Groove For Thought blog. We thought we'd use this as a way to share interesting stories, thoughts, and other more personal GFT moments with you. Comments and replies are always appreciated. Here's a funny anecdote from our trip to France last October.

We had a few hours to kill before our last gig of the week. We had completely run out of change for our CD sales table so Peter, Brennan, and I went searching for some Euros in small denominations. The problem was that it was Sunday afternoon in St. Lo, a pretty small town quite a ways outside of Paris. Nothing was open except for a few restaurants. I remembered seeing a change machine that spit out 1 Eruo coins at an American style, Buffalo/Cowboy themed steak house we had eaten at earlier in the week. When we got to the restaurant we tried for about 15 minutes to get the machine to accept our 20 Euro bills. No luck. We tried a 50 euro bill. No luck. It kept spitting them back out at us. After a while, we flagged down a friendly hostess that spoke very little English (why should she, it's not like she has three American schlubs like us coming in every day trying to use the change machine with out actually purchasing anything at the restaurant). She gave us a pretty funny look, but figured out what our problem was and tried to help us change our bills into coins using the machine. Still no luck.

Finally she took two 20 Euro bills of ours and went back behind the counter to exchange them for crisp new bills from her cash register. Finally the machine accepted them and coins came spitting out like we had won the jackpot on a slot machine. It was about this time that we looked more closely at the coins to realize that they all had images of buffaloes on them. This whole time, we had been trying to get buffalo tokens only accepted in the restaurant's arcade games. No wonder the hostess was looking at us funny. Three American adults trying to get upwards of 50 euros in video game tokens. In any case, they wouldn't refund our money so we were out the 40 Euros.

We were forced to go make small purchases at a McDonald's with large bills so that we could get the change we so desparately needed. Turns out they serve McBeer in French McDonald's. Who knew? Would it have been possible for the three of us to look like stupider Americans than we did that day? Probably not.