Category: travel

Bills and coins from Australia

While packing for my trip to Australia, I learned a bit about the different kinds of bills and coins to look out for. I found a fantastic online guide, and reformatted it into a printer-friendly A4-size PDF, which I printed and took with me.

My list didn’t do me a lot of good, though, because most of the time I was inside the resort, and the fee for the workshop and lodgings included almost all the meals. Nevertheless, I did manage to get different denominations of bills and at least one of the special-issue coins, along with samples of three different portraits of the queen from different eras of coinage.

I couldn’t believe—I still can’t believe—how HUGE the 50-cent coins are! I didn’t think any country in the world had coins this bulky.

Here’s an Australian 50-cent coin next to a current Singapore 50-cent coin, a current US 25-cent coin, and one of the old Singapore 50-cent coins, which until now I thought seemed big!

The twelve-sided shape is awesome, though, I have to admit.

The embroidered flag patch I bought in the airport was expensive, but looks to be of good quality. I resisted buying any plastic keychains shaped like kangaroos. The pens were free, courtesy of Greenleaf Press (the organizer of the retreat) and Montville Country Cabins (the workshop and retreat venue where we stayed).

Rerouted!

What should have been a twenty-four-hour, three-airport trip from Atlanta to Singapore turned into a thirty-plus-hour, five-airport trip.

I watched another seven-and-a-half movies.

There are two red symbols on top of Tokyo, one for each of the airports I was at (Narita and Haneda).

The reason my trip got longer was that at some point while we were flying over Canada, someone on the plane had a stroke. We backtracked to Minneapolis/St. Paul to get him off the plane and then the plane had to be refueled and paperwork filled out.

I missed my connecting flight at Tokyo Narita Airport because of the delay. Delta issued new tickets, but I had to collect my luggage and wait for Delta to put me on a bus to the Tokyo Haneda Airport (about an hour away). Delta gave me about $20 in meal vouchers which I used to buy a nice dinner at a katsu restaurant.

It was a lot of extra travel time, but it wasn’t really so bad for me. I spoke with a guy who had been on a flight from Florida to Atlanta before being re-routed on the flight from Atlanta to Narita, and his new flight to Seoul took off a couple of hours after mine.

Obviously the one with the worst luck was the man with the stroke. I hope he’s okay…

I remember what they said to us at Mammoth Cave: once you start the tour, there is no magic button to get you out if something goes wrong underground. Similarly, it takes time to come back from the sky when something goes wrong on a plane.

See below for photos taken at Haneda.

Continue reading Rerouted!

SIN > NRT > ATL

My trip to visit my parents in Atlanta looked like this, more or less. It took me over 24 hours to get there.

I watched two movies on the way from Singapore to Tokyo and another two and a half on the way from Tokyo to Atlanta.

I made the map using http://myflightbook.com.

Changi Airport is very pretty, and always trying (sometimes successfully) to beat Incheon for the title of Best Airport Anywhere.
This terminal at Narita has undergone renovation, and the origami store I remember from a previous visit is gone. The bookstore, however, remains.
I hope this Narita shop never closes! The stuff it sells is more varied than the stuff at a typical airport souvenir shop.

Vietnamese banknotes

Whenever I visit a foreign country, I try to collect one each of all the bills and coins in use; my husband also likes to have a set of his own, so I assembled one for him this time too. Nine different bills! Six polymer and three paper.

Since the coins aren’t worth much, I didn’t run across any in use. I did see some at a stall selling postcards, stamps, and other items of interest to tourists, but they were glued on to a dirty old cardboard “collector’s album” with some undoubtedly fake/replica ancient coins and some random, beat-up coins from other countries (including an American penny next to a label that said it was a nickel). No thanks.

Since the Wikipedia article on Vietnamese banknotes doesn’t let you see the images of the banknotes (you have to click a bunch of links to another site), I’ve scanned mine and posted them below.

The 200k note shows Ha Long Bay, and the 100k note shows a gate at the Temple of Literature in Hanoi, two locations I’ve now seen in person.

Continue reading Vietnamese banknotes

Embroidered flag patches

This is the current state of my collection of embroidered flag patches. (They’re all about the same size and quality now, yay!)

The ones in plastic bags are all ones I just bought in Vietnam.

These are all flags from countries I’ve visited (except that I haven’t been to Malaysia, the Philippines, or Mexico overnight, and one is the Buddhist flag).

China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, Japan, Korea
India, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Buddhism, ,
Laos, Vietnam, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand,
Cambodia, Myanmar, Myanmar (old), Malaysia, Indonesia,
UK, Spain, Portugal, France, Hungary, Germany

I also have flag patches for cities and states I’ve lived in, plus the US, plus a variety of other embroidered patches for sites, places, brands, and institutions.

I would like to have flag patches for:

  • Italy (+ Vatican City)
  • Honduras
  • UAE (no overnight visit)
  • England
  • …any other countries I visit in the future!