Beans for Breakfast

In the course of cleaning my apartment I dug up:

• $1.54 in coins taped to the back of a postcard
  Fiona sent me the change that was left at the end of her 1997 U.S. trip. The words “emergency cheering up kit” are written on the back. If I remember correctly, Fiona advised me to buy candy bars with the money.

• $15 Canadian
  This is money left from the trip to Vancouver that Justin and I went on a couple of years ago.

• Assorted coins in discontinued European currencies and a British £1 coin.
  On my backpacking trip a few years ago, I kept all the leftover currency in a Zip-Lok bag tucked away in my backpack. At the end of the trip I had about $50 in paper currency. I couldn’t find any place that offered realistic exchange rates and ended up getting only $35 from Thomas Cook.

• A Royal Bank of Scotland £1 note
  It was change from a chain bookstore in Edinburgh I think. Taped to my refrigerator.

• 41 Czech Korunas in coins
  In Prague someone gave me a handful of 10 heller and 20 heller coins as change - worth less than one cent each. She looked apologetic and said that it was all she had. When I tried to use them elsewhere, no one would accept them as payment.

• Resting inside the hubcap from a Volkswagen: 130 pennies, a half-inch shred from the lower left-hand corner of a $1 bill, and the revolver from the board game Clue.
  The hubcap was left behind by Cory, my old roommate Joe’s old roommate, (or by one of Cory’s friends). The pennies just accumulated there as pennies do. Of the dollar bill fragment and the game piece, my memory is foggy at best. I couldn’t say with any confidence whether the two are related.