As I was walking to the train station after work today, I looked down at the corner of Wabash and Lake streets in Chicago and saw this lying on the sidewalk. It's a Norway 5 kroner coin from 1998. I know it's nothing special and it has some damage but it was so weird to find it there that I just wanted to share it.
You could dream up a dozen stories of how that came to be there, and all of them would be amazing. Was it someone who came back from their European vacation and realized he couldn't spend the coin here, and dropped it, or was it somehow spent and came to someone in their change. Again, not being able to spend it, putting it out. Perhaps someone dropped it unintentionally. Chicago is a big "town" and it just goes to show that it is a small world.
Yeah, if it was from Mexico or Poland you might think someone from that country dropped it because there are a lot of people from both countries in Chicago, but Norway is just so random. It's a big coin too, between the size of a quarter and a half dollar, and has a hole in the middle so it is unlikely to be mistaken for an American coin. Maybe it slipped out of the pocket of a Norwegian tourist.
I keep a very detailed list of my collection. If I get a coin in a weird way, I record it. Coins I got when visiting Canada, Mexico, Japan, Korea, and GB are recorded that way. Additionally, foreign coins (except Canadian) I got in change I record as well as what I got it as, i.e. a British 5 pence as a dime.
I used to keep separate coins I inherited from relatives and things like that but gave up eventually. I still remember with a lot of them though. I'll probably never forget where this one came from, or at least not for a long time.
