When zero doesn't mean nothing

I am learning so much. It is like a school excursion, it is the best way to learn anything and spark interest in learning. Hungary is a fascinating place that I knew very little about before coming here. Budapest used to be 2 cities. Buda is up on the hill on one side of the Danube River and Pest on the other. When they built bridges between them they decided to make them one big city. It was originally called Pest Buda but they decided it was too hard to say. It has about 2 million people. Hungary has a population of 10 million. They call it BudaPesht.
Around 1000AD, there was a King called Steven. He got permission from the Pope to become King, in exchange for making Hungary a Christian country. He was also the head of the Church so he carried a double cross, I am not sure whether this is where the term 'double cross' comes from. In St Steven's Basilica (big Church seats 6000 people)there are no statues of Mary, just him. He was made a saint by Rome shortly after his death. There were kings for about another 500 years, then Hungary became part of a bigger land with Romania and a couple of other countries. I don't remember details, just ideas. After becoming a separate country again, they went on the losing side in both world wars. Then they got taken over by Russia. They had a really bad 20th Century, that is why we have so many Hungarians in Australia. Hitler and his henchmen killed 600 000 Jews and Gypsies just in Hungary. The camps were full so they just took them down to the river and shot them and pushed their bodies into the river. There is a memorial of 60 metal boots down by the river. We took a photo.
Budapest looks really beautiful and really old but most of it including all the bridges between Buda and Pest were destroyed in the Second World War. They have rebuilt and restored everything beautifully except for one building riddled with bullet holes, which used to be the Ministry of Defense, which they kept as a memorial.
We went to a beautiful building this afternoon which houses the markets, both food and craft. They do beautiful embroidery and woodwork and folk art. I just wanted to buy a little bit more than I had in local currency which is called the Florint. The exchange rate is approximately 150 Ft = AUS$1. This is really confusing and hard to calculate the cost of things. I went to an automatic teller and it gave me a few options, in Hungarian. I wanted to get 7500 Ft but I accidentally took out 75000Ft. Oops. Maybe I should not be in charge of Maths at BRPS any more. There was no way I was going to spend that much in half a day and the florint is worth nothing once out of the country. It is like Samoan dollars. Nobody wants them. I felt really sick when I looked at how much money I had in my hand. I bought a few things and then we changed the rest at an exchange place for euros, which we will need for the rest of the trip. It was an expensive mistake, but it really only cost us the cost of exchanging twice. I will be more careful from now on. Zeros do have value after all.
We sail off at 6pm for the Slovak republic and should be in Bratslavia (I think) by about 1pm tomorrow.