Millions and millions

The Chinese monetary unit is the CNY (Chinese Yuan), aka. rénmínbì RMB, or 人民币. I needed to acquire some before I left. First, I checked out the TD at Dundas and Spadina. I'm a TD member, and thought they'd have the best rate. Also, I figured that a bank in the middle of Chinatown would have CNY. Unfortunately, they'll only do an exchange if you order the RMB a week in advance.
So, I went a couple of doors down to an exchange kiosk called Goldium II (apparently they exchange gold as well as currency). I thought that I had been ripped off, since they gave me a rate of 0.155CAD/CNY (6.45CNY/CAD), but when I checked today's rate online, it was 0.151CAD/CNY, which means they charged 2.5% for the exchange. Not so bad.
The guy in front of me was counting about $30,000CAD in $100 bills... dark thoughts clouded me for a few moments, but soon faded. I felt rich upon leaving, since I had a stack of 100's filling my pocket. There's something about foreign currency that takes a while to settle in though. At first, it always feels like fake money. If I had been carrying around that cash in CAD, I'd have been a bit nervous. But somehow, the equivalent in CNY didn't arouse much. Truthfully spoken, I'm not really nervous about carrying around large chunks of Canadian dollars, but all the same, the toy-money phenomenon is still lingering.