When traveling abroad, I never fully grasped the process of changing money. My time in Panama is relatively embarrassment-free considering they use the US dollar. While the language and supermarket brands tend to differ, the denominator currency is always the same. In Colombia though, paying with pesos tends to overwhelm me as there’s always that little extra chore required – even when buying something simple like a sausage.

They say that thinking in pesos takes a while to get used to, but so does living with no legs, and no one’s suggesting that’s the least bit enjoyable. There are roughly 2,000 Colombian pesos in every US dollar, which means, if you’re good at math, you’ll divide any price you see in Colombia by 2,000 to get a rough equivalent in US cash. This assumption however, does not speak for those of us who are not good at math. Those of us who not only flunked algebra and calculus, but are entirely freaked out around numbers over two or three digits. It is for this reason that I sometimes wish Colombia would simply hack off the last three digits from their prices making the conversion a simple ratio of 1:2. A soda that costs 1,425 pesos. Why not just make it 1?

It’s not purely addition and subtraction that I suck at. It’s anything relating to numbers. Phone numbers, paying bills, the date I was born. There was a time back in college I was dating a really cute girl we’ll call Samantha. Our anniversary was approaching and, looking back on it, she had left me plenty of hints: the pictures on the fridge of when we first met, the tickets on my desk from our first concert, the note on my car saying “it’s our anniversary this weekend, don’t fuck things up.” Well, I did fuck it up and absent-mindedly decided to fly to New Orleans with my friends for a weekend rager. Amidst the scolding I got when we returned, I remember her taking a big sigh and concluding that I was “right-brained” as if it was some sort of affliction or handicapped. This is to say, my ability to understand anything relating to numbers was Special Olympicsesque. "Well thank you," I said.

When I visit Colombia, I usually stop and change my cash at the airport where you don’t need to wonder if you are getting ripped off on the conversion rate, because they provide a little receipt proving so. You can also change currency at Colombia’s banks, outside of which are often sketchy men offering to do the conversion for a better rate. I’ve never fallen prey to one of these guys, but a friend almost exchanged his cash for what looked to be one step up from monopoly money: which is to say, street converters are known to use counterfeit bills.

If there’s one advantage to using pesos in Colombia it’s the baseless feeling that you are somehow rich. Homeless man wants a thousand pesos, why not? I think to myself. 180 grand for a pair of sneakers – what the hell, I’m feeling good today. I imagine it’s how someone like Bill Gates or the Bono might go about his day: a window into the life of philanthropy. A taste of what it feels like to think not in one-dollar bills, but in thousand-dollar bills. I now understand the obsession rappers like Lil’ Wayne and Fat Joe have with money. The sensation of carrying big wads around in my pocket. The sensation of “rolling thick.” The sensation of knowing when and how to “make it rain.” It seems that against my desperate hopes, the prospects of Colombia converting to the US dollar are getting slimmer and slimmer, so in the name of good-spiritery, I am learning to embrace the Colombian peso, well, quite simply for what it’s worth.