Saturday, September 29, 2012

Currency is all relative

Lincoln gets the Penny and the Fiver
Jefferson gets the Nickel and the elusive Two buck bill
FDR gets the Dime
Washington gets the Quarter and the Dollar bill
JFK gets the Half Dollar
Sacagawea and apparently Grover Cleveland get the Dollar Coin (Thanks Wiki)
Mr. Hamilton shows off his stuff on the 10 dollar Federal Reserve note
Jackson graces the Twenty
Grant looms over us on the Fifty
And
Franklin reminds us all that he was nice enough to start the first libraries every time we spend a hundred bones.  Lucky for us, we never spend more than a Hamilton on our library fines.

Here in Vietnam only one man stares back at you as you pay your electric bill.








To think, his brother who sold chicken was the disappointment in the family, he never had his own currency.

Also, since the 500,000 is worth about 24 bucks, I happened to have all this currency on me today.  The 500 because I can't spend it anywhere, everyone rounds up or down to 1000 except someone 3 weeks ago who gave me the 500.  I keep a hold of the 1000 and the 2000 to park our motorbikes.  We have to keep 10k, 20k, 50k, 100k, to do business with street vendors.  We have to make a point to split our 500k and 200k bills at the grocery stores so that aren't handing unbreakable currency for 20,000 worth of chicken on a stick.  It sounds very bourgeois.  We are not drowning in money (in paper currency- we sometimes are) but its hard to transition form a card economy to a minor-bill economy for most of our transactions.
We can only get 100,000 or 500,000 notes out of the ATM, but if we give a 10,000 note to park our bike the security/parking men look at us hatefully, so we carry nickles and dimes in cash, piles of it, daily.

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