I’m not a fan of junk drawers. Junk is, at best, stuff, and extraneous stuff—whether it’s homeless bobby pins or knick-knacks—just plain bothers me. My husband is with me on this, luckily. The German word for knick-knack is schnick-schnack, in case you were wondering. The problem is that those little twisty ties do have to go somewhere. There’s no room in your wallet for the leftover Euros from that last business trip. And emergency Band-Aids? Better have a few of those within reach in case my mandoline and I get into one of our little quarrels. So on, so forth, and a junk drawer in Budapest was born. On the bright side, junk in a drawer is better than junk on my kitchen counter. That keeps it mostly out of sight and mind, at least until it’s time to move.
The night before the movers arrived, I decided to face the junk drawer, in all it’s gum- and toothpick-filled splendor. Until that point, I hadn’t considered the range of foreign currency we had accumulated in two years. There were Euros, U.S. dollars, Dutch Antillian guilders, Hungarian forints, British pounds, Croatian kuna, and Polish zloty. All in annoyingly small denominations. A smattering of groszy and Canadian coins rounded things out. A few thoughts crossed my mind:
- Wow, remember when the Canadian coins were the exotic ones?
- We should use credit cards more often.
- None of these coins, except the American cents really mean much to me. This is, sadly, a glorified pile of Monopoly money.
Aside from the fact that the real value of the dollar has changed in the last two years, that last point is fascinating to me. As a foreigner, it’s difficult to get a feeling for so many things in their natural state. To internalize is to understand and belong…and that takes a very long time. Even after two years in Hungary, I couldn’t tell you (without converting to dollars) whether a shirt costing 6,500 forints was a good deal or not. Though I have some sense for the Euro, I think in dollars. Husband thinks in Euros, but a lot of Germans go so far as to mentally retro-convert to Deutsche Marks (which is not only surprising, but also an especially depressing cost exercise).
Then there are, for example, swear words. Oh my. I was appalled at first by the tendency of non-native speakers to throw around 4-letter English words here in Europe. F*ck-up is another word for mistake, even in business. Sh*t is a toy word that carries no cultural weight. (Funny enough, the common usage in Hungary is with an article, as in, “We are in a big sh*t.”) Once I stopped falling off my chair, I started to see this as a really interesting reflection of how we assign meaning to things. Even if people know the proper translation, you might say that these naughty words have the same depth of meaning to them as that 2,000 forint cash note has to me. I’m only scratching the surface of this topic, but I’ll leave it there for now.
Anyway, I sorted and stacked coins for over an hour. Just to get an idea of value (because I was curious by that point, and because I’m that cool) I made a spreadsheet and converted everything to dollars, for a total of $154.26. Then and only then (and I’m serious here) did it occur to me that I had no idea what to do with all those strange coins. In the U.S., I would simply roll them in paper tubes and deposit them, or dump the whole lot into a coin sorting machine. But in Hungary, with such a random assortment? No clue.
This leads me to point number two about expats. We often find ourselves in the most ridiculous situations. We are helpless (and often emotional!) in the face of even primitive tasks. I mean, when was the last time you looked at a pile of change in frustration and said, “Oh great. How in the world am I going to get rid of all this money?” It’s distressingly silly, really.
In the end, I decided to send all those American pennies home with my parents when they come visit—luggage weight and parental restrictions permitting. (Okay Mom, Dad?) There were enough zloty to make it worth exchanging them into forints so I could buy snacks for the moving guys. I left the remaining forints as a nice and/or annoying tip for someone. The Euros are currently going toward subway tickets, coin operated laundry machines, and the odd pack of Haribo sweets.
As for the rest, who knows? Maybe they’ll eventually find their way into one of those airport currency donation bins. Or we’ll find our way back to where they came from. In the meantime, I have a feeling that kunas and Canadian quarters are going to (…sigh) christen our new junk drawer in Munich.
