PARIS: Much ballyhooed in recent months, the Euro will become a daily fact of life Tuesday for 300 million Europeans who will at last take delivery of their new currency, and see them have to confront not only seven new multi-coloured bills but also eight coins that will prove completely different from anything they have had to deal with heretofore.

Although the conversion from the old national currencies to the Euro is theoretically to take less than two months, the changeover should last considerably longer, especially in countries like France where many Frenchmen still have not yet adjusted to the “new” Franc introduced more than forty years ago. Obliged already to mentally convert from an old Franc to the new one, introduced in 1960, by dividing by 100, they will now have to take the result and multiply it in turn by 6.56.

Other obstacles stand in the way of the introduction of the Euro. In France, the employees who print the Euro bills at Chamalieres, and those who mint the Euro coins at Peissac, have gone on strike, obliging French authorities to import Euros from Italy and Spain, so instead of having coins with the images of Voltaire or Rousseau, the French will have to be satisfied with the effigies of Michelangelo or Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote. Then too there are the armed robberies, which preceded the introduction of the Euro by several weeks. Many have already taken place in Italy and Spain - where, true to the past, counterfeit Euros have already circulated much more rapidly than the real ones.

As for France, it has seen its first Euro-denominated bank robbery at Mougins, although authorities had taken extraordinary measures - including the providing of military escorts to oversee the transfer of Euros to businesses throughout the country - in fear of a countrywide strike that has been promised by the country’s armoured car sector if things get too much out of hand.

In France too, bank and postal employees, who are at the centre of the distribution of the new Euros on Jan 1, say that on that day they will be out on strike. Monaco, which has issued its own new Euro coin, with a portrait of Prince Rainier, says that it will have a problem come Jan 1, since so many collectors have been amassing the new coins that none are left to distribute to consumers, who on that day will just have to do like before and continue making payment in Francs.

But, the good news in all of this is that the makers of Monopoly have lost no time in putting out a new version of their ages-old game which incorporates the Euro. Winning Moves, the appropriately- named company that distributes the game in France for its manufacturer Hasbro, says indeed that it was so well prepared for introduction of the new currency that it will be distributing several local versions of Monopoly. For the French like many of their European counterparts, suggests Karpiel, the Euro being introduced on Tuesday still remains millions of light years away.