This is one of those travel things you use at home rather than while travelling. I don’t get through all that many currencies – mostly I have Icelandic and Norwegian kroner which I know I’ll use again in the next year or two, I seem to go back to Switzerland about every five years and I use Euros every now and then. But I also have a few Danish and Swedish kroner, I have a few (now obsolete) Lithuanian litas and a very few Romanian lei. My dad keeps his Euros in a ceramic beetroot (yes, really) and I eventually got tired of separating four different kind of kroner which are really only differentiated by the country name written in small letters on it somewhere.
And then my sister gave me this for Christmas.
It’s a multi-currency piggy bank! It’s a sphere made up of six segments, each with a slot for easily depositing your currency and with a big square hole concealed on the inside for easy retrieval. I now have two of them, although the second one is mostly empty.
This is with one of the segments removed so you can see what it looks like on the inside. The segments just slot in and out of the whole so I can take out whichever I like to empty or just to count it.
It comes with stickers for labelling the segments – I don’t find them all that helpful. Putting four “kr” stickers on four segments is no easier than just having all my kroner mixed up. Fortunately, it comes with little pictograms so I’ve put a plane on the Icelandic segment (to represent the long flight across the cold ocean), mountains on the Norwegian one (to represent Norway’s mountains), a big wheel on the Danish one (to represent the Tivoli in Copenhagen) and a car on the Swedish one (to represent the three hours spent sitting in a traffic jam on a mountain pass). I suppose I could have just broken out the Sharpie but since they’d gone to the effort of including stickers, I wanted to use the stickers. But I wish they’d used the ISO currency codes, or at least included letters so I could spell ISK, NOK, SEK, DKK, CHF, EUR and so on. So much easier than having to decipher my own hieroglyphics.
Labelling issues aside, this is such a handy thing! I’m really not sure what else I can say about it, apart from that being able to separate multiple currencies makes life easier and that you have to put it down carefully to make sure it doesn’t roll away. Mostly it’s ok because the weight of coins in the bottom tends to weigh it down but make sure it’s settled before leaving it on a shelf.
Also, don’t take out a segment to count the contents and then put the money back in the slot before you put the segment back in the globe, otherwise the money will fall straight back out through the big hole in the back.
Do you want one? You can get it here at Amazon (this is an affiliate link, so if you buy anything from Amazon, I get a few pennies)
