I was thinking of buying Euros before I left the US, but checking with my local currency exchange, they're giving me about .64 Euros per US Dollar, when the official exchange rate is more like .74 Euros per US Dollar. That's absurd.
I hear that people like to use ATMs in Crete to get local currency.
However, in the US, we're kind of annoyed at ATMs because we're always getting charged a fee by the operator of the ATM, plus another fee by our bank for not using one of their ATMs.
So how much does it typically cost (vs. the official exchange rate) to get Euros via an ATM in Plakias?
Checking with my bank, Washington Mutual, they charge 3 US Dollars every time I use an ATM. They also, strangely quoted an exchange rate of 1 Euro costing 1.2638 US Dollars while Yahoo.com (and other official exchange rate websites) say a Euro costs about 1.336 US Dollars). And just to confuse things, my bank thinks it has a different rate for using my ATM as a Visa... but they don't know what that rate is.
Also, my bank says my ATM card will only work in machines that are part of the Plus, Interlink or Star networks. Which (if any) of the Plakias ATMs are part of one or more of those networks?