FicWad

"I'm here all week folks, tip your elves." I loved that line; totally in character with the Harry you are portraying. His life is a comedy show anyway, so why not act the part of a vaudevillian?

I'm honored and flattered that you liked my idea enough to use it, although I am curious as to what you had planned. Keeping Harry out of it was very well played, it preserves his moral high ground as well as sets the stage for his friends to protect him. And his clueless, "I don't care about your money either" to Daphne was priceless.

I can't wait to see what an honorable Slytherin and a driven Gryffindor can come up with in terms of payback for Ron. That should be something to see!

As to your conversion rate, I concur that it should somehow be higher than 5 pounds to the Galleon. Here are a couple more examples from canon. Harry buys his wand for 7 Galleons from Ollivander, supposedly one of the best wandmakers in the world. At 5 pounds or about 10 dollars US to the pound that's only $70 for such a powerful instrument, about the cost of a decent calculator for a student. Given that there are only 50 or so new students each year how could Ollivander stay in business? How many wizards break there wands each year? Multiply that by a factor of 15, or 75 pounds per Galleon, the cost of the wands are about $1000 or the price of an inexpensive laptop computer. That seems more realistic, don't you think?

The second example is Arthur Weasley won 700 Galleons at the beginning of PoA and used to to take his kids on a trip overseas. It sounded like a pretty full blown holiday, and they were gone long enough that Harry couldn't visit them that summer, so several weeks at least. How much would it cost to send seven people on a top notch vacation to a foreign country for three weeks? Plus there was a bit left over to put in Gringotts as I recall.

All in all a significant amount of support in the books that a Galleon is worth more than the common 5 pounds.

Thanks again;
BJH