World coins you have spent while traveling abroad

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Singapore was the last country I’ve visited back in 2018 as part of family vacation, and since then I’ve never even crossed my state border lol.
My dad use to work there back in the 2000s, a nice multicultural place, literally has four national languages (Tamil, Malay, Mandarin, and English), but the weather will cook you with humidity.

I just used their new series of coins featuring the country’s infrastructure, while the old ones showed the flora. I particularly like the bimetallic $1 with micro image!
Old series

New series

 

That creature is called the Merlion, infact the word Singapore comes from mix of Tamil/Sanskrit where Singa means lion and Pore/puram means place.

 

I received this coin for change in a Prague public toilet. A visit to the toilet cost 5 koruna. For this amount, I could visit it twice...

 

When I visited the Dominican Republic - 2018

 

Argentina Trip - 2009

 

I have all of these when I visited Barcelona Spain in 2008

 

I have one I can contribute and get the extra credit points to boot!

I was wee youngster living in El Paso at my grandparents home. They liked to travel across the border to Juarez. Grandma was a shopaholic.... Somewhere along the way she gave me a stack of Mexican peso's dated 1959. I remembered that because it was my birth year. In my young mind they were the same as a dollar.. Not!

Grandma was shopping and I covertly found a vendor that was selling switchblade knives and I just had to have one. Now, keep in mind that a youngster carrying a knife back in those days wasn't a bad thing.... I was astonished that the little bitty knife transaction used up all the peso's grandma gave me. My first lesson in foreign currency values.... And the worst part was when we came back across the border they asked to see everything we purchased. I pulled the switchblade knife out of my pocket which was confiscated and caused Grandmas car to have to be searched!

Last year @stldanceartist listed some of them for sale here and I grabbed up his 1959 peso's as a remembrance of grandma and my ill advised switchblade purchase.

 

I haven't yet gotten past "traveling abroad"...what's that...??? Actually I take that back...I did drive down once with some high-school friends in 1969 from O.C. to Tijuana...that's as "abroad" as I've ever been or ever want to go, esp these days. I wasn't into any foreign coins at the time. Some day...days that are running out, one way or another...would like to take my wife back to Hawaii for a visit where she lived and went to middle/high school for several years way back when. She wants to take me to Ireland, land of my ancestors...such a dream of mine...I told her if she ever got me there I'd probably never come home.

 

I've traveled in too many countries and spent their currency, to even begin a list, but love reading others experiences.

 

I was very lucky. My father was in the Army and we lived in Europe twice. My first move to Europe was to Germany in 1953. I was six. When I was 8, my parents took us on a tour of Europe. Our first stop was in Paris. Can you image what it felt like when an 8 year old goes to the top of the Eifel Tower? There were stairs and an elevator. We took the elevator. Our next stop was the Arche de Triumph sp?
Our next country was Italy. We skirted the Mediterranean Sea. We travelled in a 1950 Studebaker Commander. It was very hot and we talked our parents into letting us swim. He pulled to the side of the road and went to the beach. He came back and told us we could not swim there, that we would have to go to another beach. It wasn't until years later that I was told that the beach we couldn't go to was a nude beach. Dad had some binoculars. My brother and I were able to see the people on the nude beach. There was a U.S. Navy ship in the Sea. Our binoculars were strong enough to see the sailors and they, too, were looking at the nude beach.
Our next stop was Rome and all the beauties it held. I don't know how to spell them but we went underground to the catacombs. I stuck my hand in one of the "shelves". Sorry about the lengthy message. We went to the Leaning Tower of Pisa. There were 2 ways up to the bell tower. One was on the outside and the other on the inside. There was an age limit on the outside. My father let us go on the outside for a few floors.
I had a bucket load of European coins from each nation, but, I was 11 when we returned to the states, so I wasn't very careful. I do love to see your coins from foreign countries.

 

Extra credit, huh? OK, here goes . . .

I used a Swiss 5 Franc coin like this one to buy a bottle opener at a gift shop in Vaduz, the capital of Liechtenstein. (Swiss Franc is the official currency of L-stein.)

 

I put a lovely Czech 50 Korun toward the tip for an equally lovely Pilsner Urquell at a sidewalk café in Prague.

 

A couple of German 2 Euro coins bought this tall cold glass of Hacker-Pschorr’s finest in Munich.

 

Purchased this over the counter at a bank when I lived in Donets'k. Back then 5 hryven was roughly $1 - now it is about 7-8 cents since the war in 2014.

 

Did you notice that most EVERYTHING was in English?

 

yeah! I only saw all the languages in one place at stations and in danger signs!