How much money should you bring with you?

Now let me start off this post by saying that I went back and checked out a bunch of my other posts, and I'm almost postive that I never really talked about this topic.  I know I talked about how I got the money I brought with me, but how much I never really addressed.

And obviously the situation for every person is different, but this is just how I worked it out.

I decided to bring with me $300 worth of pounds (which I think was like 175 pounds).  I came up with this amount for a couple of reasons.

One was that when I was leaving for Glasgow, I wasn't 100% convinced that I would actually have a place to stay when I arrived there.  As I previously talked about, I had signed up for "pre-term accommodations", and you had to pay a separate fee for housing for the week before the rest of the students (non-study abroad) students arrived.  However, there hadn't been a way to pay this fee prior to arriving, which concerned me.  So I made sure I brought with me enough money to cover this fee, if they asked for it at Cairncross when I "signed in", and if for whatever reason, they just decided to not give me a room and not let me pay the fee (meaning I would have no where to go), the money would then cover a hotel, at least for the night. 

I then added in a little bit for some of the expenses that I was pretty sure I'd have to pay for right away, like a blanket (I knew I'd have to buy one),  a cell phone.

I also added in a little bit incase I had to take a taxi from the Glasgow Airport- even though I had signed up for the Welcome Shuttle. 

   Incase you haven't noticed, I like to be prepared.

So all of those expenses added together, plus a little bit extra (for food, etc) and I wound up coming up with the $300 (175 pounds) total.

I also had on me about $40 for expenses in the Philadelphia Airport.  I highly recommend bringing some of your own currency with you.  I was able to buy a bottle of water (which I desperately needed), and then the money I had left over, I used on the way back home.

My recommondation is that you 1) bring some of your own currency with you (or at least have access to your debit card or something, even though cash can be more convenient), 2) figure out what type of expenses you may have in your first few days there and try to anticipate how much you will need, 3) add in a little bit extra.

Also, don't bring too much money with you.  Say you were going to have $5,000 total available to you for your entire study abroad program.  I think its fairly obvious to say that its not safe to do so.  Plus I think you may encounter some type of issue at customs but I don't know 100% about that.

If you don't think that you'll have many expenses straight away that you'll definitely need cash for (say you already have a British bank account or already have a debit card that can be used in the UK), just bring a small amount for things like food, taxi rides.  Say maybe... 50 pounds.  Just a guestimation.

Cultural Differences

I thought I'd share an example of cultural differences between the UK and the US -

While we were in Glasgow, one of my friends who is from the UK told us this riddle:

'Throw away the outside, eat the inside.  Eat the outside, then throw away the inside.  What is it?'


She told us this joke at dinner and it wasn't really occuring to any of us right away, so she then gave us a hint as to the answer, which was that it started with the letter 'S'.

   This then completely baffled us.  No idea at all what she was talking about.

She finally had to just give us the answer...  Sweetcorn.

Sweetcorn.

Thats why we didn't get it - in the US, corn is just corn, but in the UK, its sweetcorn. 

Just a small cultural difference, but I thought it was a bit of a funny one

    :)




   (Also, I've just realized that this is my second blog post that is completely devoted to corn... Hmm...)