Patti Mesa's hot apple donuts were selling well in the freezing cold at Maastricht's old Main Square yesterday lunchtime and she was handling her euro change with impressive ease. Twenty years of living in the picturesque Dutch town where the famous EU treaty was signed in 1991 have done nothing to soften her distinctive Spanish accent, but the arrival of the single currency has quickly provoked thoughts about the links between money, identity - and the future.
"I certainly feel Spanish when I am at home in Tenerife," Ms Mesa said, looking tired and perhaps a tad hung over after Monday night's festive euro-bash as she sprinkled sugar over a batch of steaming waffles. "But when I am here I feel more European."
With millions across Europe starting to adjust to the novelty of life without guilders, marks or pesetas, old assumptions about national allegiance may eventually be challenged and a new sense of Europeanness forged. But a brief Guardian straw poll in the chilly borderlands of the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium yesterday suggested old habits may die hard.
Mark Hollands (36), an engineer, biking through Maastricht's cobbled streets to buy currant cakes from Miss Mesa's booth, was "amazed" by the change over to the euro but quite certain that his own identity was not under threat. "I will still feel Dutch. We have a queen and the Germans do not."
In the Pothuiske cafe, on the banks of the icy Maas, near where John Major, Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl did summit battle a decade ago, pony-tailed waiter Walter Van Der Heijden felt that the town would now become even more of a crossroads. But his own relaxed sense of identity would not change. "I'm not chauvinistic but I am definitely not going to feel less Dutch because of the euro."
Just half an hour's drive away, in the German city of Aachen, national identity seemed equally intact as citizens formed orderly queues in the Spaarkasse Bank to change their marks into euros or withdraw their first bank notes at the cashpoint on the street outside.
"I still feel very German," said Mario Melcher (27), who works in a children's home. "But that is not because of money. After all, that is just something you pay with. Here the borders are still very much felt because of the second World War.
Yet europhoria does not seem set to sweep all before it for modern Europeans, concerned not by the visions of the founding fathers of integration and the high flown rhetoric of their leaders, but by ordinary practical benefits.
"It will be a very good thing on holiday," said Steve Troeuer, a Belgian builder, withdrawing his first euros in Riemst, a non-descript village five miles from the Dutch border.