One amusing side-effect of traveling the way that I do, is that after a while, your junk drawer starts to look a little bit like Doc Brown’s binder of different currencies from Back To The Future 2.
Most of the places I travel are on the Euro, but not all of them. The amount of Czech Crowns I have left would barely buy a glass of beer here, but I store it because at some point, I’ll be back in Prague. I try to use up my currency before I leave, but I don’t always succeed. I use paper CD sleeves to store them so I can see easily what I’m dealing with.
What’s the most interesting currency you have put aside?
Whimsy. Tacos. The DMV. 
After my mom died in 2012 I was going through papers and found an envelope containing 100-franc notes from the 1950’s. She had stashed them away and never converted them to Euros. I was thrilled, until I discovered that the last month/year you could convert francs to Euros was Feb. 2012. She died in May. Sigh… So, instead of being worth $400 apiece, I was able to sell them as collectables (they were in excellent condition and quite lovely) for about $40 ea. So it goes.
The moral of the story is, convert/spend your foreign money while you can. You never know.
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Unrelated: Happy birthday, Bunny!
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Thank you, Steven! What a nice surprise!
Bunny
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Although the Euro makes travelling so much easier (and I would not like to return to the old European currencies) I still kind of miss the former variety of coins and notes. I had a few irish coins which I especially liked as a kid because all of them were showing animals. It even felt kind of “exotic” to go from Germany to Austria because you had to change money and compare the prices to Deutschmark by dividing them by seven. In Germany I especially miss the “50 Pfennig” coin because it was a very beautiful coin, showing a woman planting an oak tree. Even the number 50 was shaped beautifully.
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I have a few friends who still think of things in terms of what they would cost on the old Deutschmark. I agree, the Euro does make traveling a great deal easier. I’m taking a long-ish trip in May through several different countries, and only a few of them are on the Euro- that will be an adventure in finance.
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I have five Rupee note from Pakistan a friend gave me. It’s worth five cents in the US, but I kept it because it’s very pretty and ornate, and because it allows me to make Legend of Zelda jokes in real life. 😛
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I’ve still got drachmas from my trip to Greece before they joined the euro. And of course way too many yen floating around from trips.
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Ooh, currency is so pretty! I like your organizational system! 🙂 I make jewelry from any coins that come my way, and my second favorite bookmark is a bill from Guatemala. 😀
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