Dublin's Temple Bar may have been full of new year revellers in the early hours yesterday but there was precious little sign of the euro.
Despite its official introduction at midnight on January 1st, a trawl of the capital's cultural quarter found that pounds and pence still held sway in pubs, fast-food outlets and late-night shops.
The hard-pressed staff in the thronged Oliver St John Gogarty pub admitted they were waiting "until tomorrow" before taking on the additional task of dispensing the new currency.
Meanwhile, fast-food outlets like Eddie Rocket's and Rasher Byrne's dispensed burgers and sausages to the hungry - in return for pounds and pence.Also waiting for the daylight hours before switching over to the new currency were the 24-hour shops who were sticking with what they knew best.
Centras and Spars around the city centre were still dealing in pounds, giving them out even to those who were paying with credit cards and looking for money back.
By now desperately seeking the euro, The Irish Times decided to turn to the city's transport providers to find evidence of its arrival, but the staff at the Dublin Bus Nitelink ticket desk on Westmoreland Street had yet to be presented with euro while the driver of the 39N Nitelink bus to Blanchardstown had also seen no sign of it.
But just when hope was at an end, the elusive euros finally surfaced at the Heavenly Food Company in the heart of Temple Bar. Serving grilled frankfurters and Italian coffee, and staffed by a Belgian and a Ukrainian, the cafΘ's till was well stocked with new euro coins.
With a little prompting from The Irish Times, they undertook their first euro transaction. Presented with £2 for a hot chocolate costing £1.65, they handed out 44 cents, the equivalent of 35p, in change. The bemused purchaser pocketed the shiny new coins and wandered off into the night, without her hot chocolate.
In Continental Europe there was much more of a rush. Many people rushed to withdraw euros from automated teller machines (ATMs) as soon as the euro became legal tender at midnight. Belgium had reported 600 cash withdrawals per minute in the first two hours of the new year.
And in Beziers, France, Mr Oscar Lyons, from Glenageary in Dublin, claimed to be the first to use Irish euro coins in France. The youngster used coins from a starter pack to purchase a drink in a cafΘ at the stroke of midnight ( 11 p.m. Irish time).
In Germany, taxi-drivers were first off the mark, so to speak, offering change in euros by midnight, though many shops and bars were reportedly slower to change over.
By the end of the week we should all be well used to it. The EU Commission forecast that more than half of all transactions in the euro zone would be conducted in euros by then.