World Travels

When I worked during the 80's, 90's and up until 2001, I got to travel internationally - a lot.  It started when my company wanted to install ATM machines in airports all over the world and later wanted to have banks sell their product.  I was lucky enough to be the person that explained how it was done to the bank's business and technical personnel.  Then, the financial industry wanted a standard way of talking to the ATMs and sending transactions so I met with international banking organizations and we hammered out standards.  Of course, this worked best face to face so I racked up thousands of airline miles, meeting up in a different host county once or twice a year.

So here I am years later digging through memorabilia and I find my foreign currency change purse. Back before the Euro, each country in Europe issued its own currency.  When I travelled, I would buy some of the local currency when I arrived in a new country and try to spend it all before I left.  What didn't get spent ended up in my stash at home. I spent a couple of hours sorting out the coins by country of origin, including a little surfing to identify some of the tricky ones.  Here's the list of countries:

coins from my travels

• Austria
• Belgium
• British Caribbean
• Canada
• Costa Rica
• Denmark
• England
• France
• Germany
• Hong Kong
• Japan
• Mexico
• Netherlands
• Portugal
• Singapore
• Spain
• Taiwan
• Thailand

Okay, some of those were vacations (British Caribbean, Costa Rica, Mexico) and there's some missing (Australia, why don't I have any from there?)

My son has a coin collection so these will go to him with the countries identified.  Time for this traveler to make new trips!