Money in Northern Ireland is funny. As it is part of the United Kingdom, it also uses the same currency - pounds. One pound equals to a hundred pences. This is the sign for a pound - £. I think that when I write the sign by hand, I am still doing it wrong. Really, try it. Try to write it just from your memory. It is so unnatural :D.
Actually in the United Kingdom there is more than one bank which produces its own banknotes. There is 12 different sets of banknotes including Isle of Man set and Gibraltar set. That causes kind of a mess. I just can't go to London and pay there with banknotes I use here. In London simply nobody knows how Bank of Ireland banknotes look like so they don't accept them. On the other hand, banknotes produced by Bank of England are accepted everywhere but these banknotes are the least creative. You can recognize them thanks to the Queen on every one of them. Thank God, coins are the same everywhere.
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| Front and back side of Bank of England banknotes |
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| Bank of Ireland banknotes I mostly use. See? No Queen. |
Using coins was a bit confusing for me at the beginning because the shapes and colours change a lot, but for me there is no obvious sequence in the shape or size. The biggest coin is 50 pence, then 2 pence, or 2 pounds, then 1 pound, then the small ones but in a strange order. I don't know. It's messy :D. 50 pence and 20 pence are polygon shaped, the rest of coins is round. The colour also changes but the only 2 colour coin is 2 pounds. There are different pictures on the coins, but of course on each there is the Queen. You can try to find coins with special pictures, one from each kind of coin, which together form the Royal Shield. That's pretty cool. So far I collected only one thanks to a nice guy in kebab stand, who was examining the coins in a cashier with me to find tha last missing 50 pence.
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| Imagine the Queen on the other side |
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| The Royal Shield |
Because I spend my time with Erasmus students, it is also not uncommon to meet foreign coins or currencies. One of the first evenings I was in Belfast we were sitting in 3 people in a pub, drinking our first Guiness and we put together not only pounds, euros and czech crowns, but also mexican, indonesian, chinese, hungarian, serbian, swiss and maybe some other coins and banknotes. I even don't remember. But I have to say, it is sometimes interesting to see, how much money can be diverse in colours, shapes, writtings or materials.
Motto of the day: The Queen in your wallet opens you door to everywhere.
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| Few pictures of money we gathered |
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| Even tough mexican banknote paper can't overcome everything |
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