Last night I decided to sort through and count up all the foreign currency I have at home. I travel a lot with work, and visit a lot of countries. Often the local businesses will accept dollars or euros, and sometimes pounds. Other times I’ll just use my various cards. But sometimes I’m going to spend a few days in the country, and might go on various adventures. The last thing I want to do is be stuck somewhere without enough money to do something spontaneous. More importantly, I never want to be stuck without enough money to hire a cab back to the cruise ship in an emergency.
So I often change too much money, or get too much money out of an ATM. And just as often, when returning to a country, I forget that I have that currency at home, so change more the next time I am there. Do this for three years and one collects quite a lot of cash one can’t spend at home.
I guessed I had about €700 of foreign monies. I counted it up last night, and spreadsheeted it this afternoon, and it turns out I have €891.87 in 29 different currencies, plus four kinds of coin and one note I can’t identify. I think some of it is Russian, but others have even less recognizable alphabets.
In case you are wondering, 5.10 in Slovenian money equals €0.02, 210 in Tanzanian money equals €0.12, and 160 in Icelandic money equals €1. Some of biggest chunks of money are, handily, in more useful currencies. US dollars (€117.73), UK pounds (€78.98) and New Turkish Liras (€115.58) I’ll be able to use no problem, as I plan to visit all those places by the end of the year. Israeli Shekels (€47.69) won’t be that handy though.
And I’d like to admit I’ve unknowingly broken the law in India by taking too much money out of the country (€69.37).
The single largest currency is Norwegian, after getting enough out of the bank to pay for various trips for two people at Nordkap and Svalbard last year, only to have the person I was traveling with to cover all the costs with his credit card (€366.76). I think I’ll just change that back into euros.
So, it seems I have more money than I thought. This is good, because I just spent a lot of money on my new laptop. Thankfully, now that I have my new laptop, I can’t think of a single thing I’d like to own that I don’t already own, so this money is going into the savings.
Or maybe an iPad.
I’ve just subscribed to your book review podcast and found it very interesting. I was sorry to see that it is impossible to leave comments on your podcast’s website.
I’m Israeli, and your invited to revisit us and spend those few Shekels you’ve got left over.
In you’re review of Calculating God, you go on about how the aliens choose to go to Canada and how pathetic that is. Well, it’s an even bigger problem for Israeli authors, when they want to put Israel in the middle of a Sci-Fi plot. I agree that there should be some kind of reason why Canada was chosen and not a Super Power, but I also like the kind of book where the alien value system places importance on a different part of the earth than us humans do.