Let’s talk about ‘banii‘, baby

   It’s for you and me. Banii is the word in Romanian for money.

   In El Salvador the word was ‘pisto’ or ‘dinero‘.

   In Senegal it depended on which people you
were with. For example the Pulaars or Fulbe used
the word ‘kaalis’. If you were with the Wolofs it
was ‘xaalis’.

   Here in Romania as I mentioned above the word is
‘banii’, the word for change is ‘rest’ and there is
another one for small change ... ‘marunt’.

   The rate of exchange of the USD 'dollar' to the RON 'Lei'
as of the date of this posting ( 3 January 2007) is ...

     1 US Dollar = 2.55742 Romanian New Lei

   The motivation for writing this entry is to describe
what I think is the best money I have encountered so
far. And that is the Romanian Leu. To me it is the best
not because of exchange rates and economics. It is
the best for the reason of it’s physical properties.

   What makes it great? … It's made out of plastic. Sounds
kind of humorous but it is actually genius in action. It is
virtually impossible to tear and when it goes into the
wash it comes out actually better than when it went in.
It is a little difficult to fold but that isn’t a problem and
it fits nicely in anyone’s wallet.

   Below you can see some of the currency. There is more
but I didn’t have them at the time.

  
  In the lower left hand corner you can see the 1 Leu.

   The Leu was first introduced in the year 2000 as a
commemorative piece at the time of the eclipse. It was
introduced as a 20,000 lei bill.

   In June 2006 the new Lei called the ‘RON’
was introduced and the old Lei was phased out
as of the 1st of January 2007.

   The old 20,000 Lei bill was equal in value to 2 new Lei
or RON of today.

   It was interesting and confusing for a person arriving
during the transitional period. People would say that the
price of something was 1,000,000 Lei. Which at first
sounded as expensive as could be but that actually
converted to 100 new Lei or RON. At the time it required
that you divided by 10,000 to convert from old to new.
1,000,000 old Lei/10,000=100 new Ron.

   Maybe there are similar plastic currencies in other
parts of the world. I didn’t see any in Central America nor
in West Africa.