The one on plastic money or me bitching about it

Although money in Vietnam indeed are made from plastic (you can’t torn them!) the plastic money I meant are credit and debit cards. Since they are constantly causing me problems I decided to bring 4 cards on this trip. 3 debits and a credit one from 2 different banks. Just to be one the safe side. I thought it was enough… Hmmm it wasn’t…

One of my credit cards was blocked before I even left Poland. Apparently some information were stolen from one of the branches of the bank so they decided to replace all of their customer’s cards. One Friday night I got a message informing me about it. Since my flight to Bangkok was on the following Monday morning there was no way I could get a new card before. My only option was to have my card permanently blocked but if I need to use it I could call the bank go through the whole security procedure so they could unblock it for 5 minutes. Real pain in the ass… I wasn’t bothered so much because I had 3 other cards that were working… At least that was what I thought.

At some point of my trip two other cards were blocked. One it was my mistake – I put the wrong PIN 3 times, second one was my bank’s fault. They thought that withdrawing 200 $ in Cambodia was a suspicious transaction… They didn’t feel the need to inform me about it. I found out in the ATM… Anyway it was few weeks ago and I sorted that out quite easily…

Now… I’m getting to the point. Yesterday… again at the ATM I found out my card wasn’t working. I called my bank and guess… Yes. 2 of my cards were blocked due to leak of customers information and again my only option is to call the bank when I want to make a transaction so they would make it work for 5 minutes… So in total 3 of my cards are blocked which as you can imagine won’t make my life easier over here… For now I’m good but I fear for the last remaining card safety… 🙂

Enough about it. In two hours I have my bus to Laos. I bought some dollars in the black market (the only way to get rid of the local curency). My Ipod is fully charged and I managed to find a real tresure in one of the bookshops – Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s children”‘. I n other words I’m prepared for the journey. Goodbye Vietnam! Hello Laos! 🙂