Originally Posted by polonius

TK, that's strictly an American prejudice. Most other cultures don't find anything suspicious about using cash. That's one of the reasons that the Americans have become so hated in Iraq -- for the first few years, at their numerous checkpoints, they would regularly confiscate "large amounts" of cash (typically anything from 2 - 100K USD) because, in their view, such quantities of cash could "only" be for people funding the insurgency, forgetting in their narrow cultural prejudices, that the Iraqi banking system was barely functioning, so if you were buying a house or a car, you brought cash.

But of course that is true in many places where the banking is functioning well. I remember when I was living in Poland and I went to a travel agent and booked a package holiday. The agent asked how I would pay and I said "cash" and pulled out 4000 USD. The guy just looks at me and says, "An American, paying in cash! Unheard of!", because Americans have this propensity to use plastic money.

I notice this also on the internet. If you buy something on line and the only payment options you are given is credit card, it's almost always an American website. Non-US websites will usually have an option to pay by bank transfer as well. I've actually called up U.S. merchants and asked to pay able to submit payment by bank transfer and some of them just simply refused to accept cash.

Non-Americans travelling in the U.S.A. who are accustomed to using cash (I was just in the U.S.A. for 10 ten days and took 15 000 USD with me), run into problems from the TSA, because these guys, like the U.S. soldiers in Iraq, are so provincial that the idea of people who do things differently from them is simply inconceivable. They run around with their plastic money believing cash is something only criminals use.