I did a presentation yesterday on the Balkans – my only work-related engagement this trip. F was most amused that I went to a place called “Foggy Bottom” to do it (and in fairness, Foggy Bottom is a very funny place name).

The reason I agreed to do it was that the people in Foggy Bottom offered me a decent honorarium which would go some way to defraying the costs of this trip. They duly presented me with a pleasantly-sized cheque drawn on Citibank of South Dakota. (Why the good people of Foggy Bottom, which is quite a long way from South Dakota, do their banking there, I don’t know.) So I left the building and more or less jumped straight on the train to New York having picked up the rest of the family en route.

So this morning I went to the nearest Citibank, on Broadway, to cash the cheque. But they told me that you can’t cash a cheque drawn on Citibank of South Dakota anywhere except South Dakota, if you don’t have an account (and of course I don’t have an American bank account of any kind). So effectively the people of Foggy Bottom have given me a useless piece of paper, with a fictitious sum of money written on it. I’ll see if my bank at home in Belgium will accept it, but I suspect I already know the answer…