Foreign Money

Obviously, for this summer's trip to Europe I want to have some Swiss francs and some British pounds.  I already have a decent amount of Swiss francs from my last trip to Switzerland.  It should be enough until I am able to get to an ATM there.  

I should mention that one thing I like about the ATMs in Switzerland is that you can select the denomination of bills that you receive.  I wish that banks here in Mexico would adopt that custom instead of always spewing out large 500 peso bills.

I was looking at the Swiss banknotes, and I saw "Twenty Francs" in both French and Italian...  "Vingt Francs", "Venti Franchi".

Of course, I know that French and Italian are both official languages of Switzerland.  But where's the German?

I turned the bill over and there was the German... "Zwanzig Franken".

But there was also a fourth language.  Many people have never heard of Switzerland's fourth official language... Romansh.  Romansh is a tongue that developed from Latin (notice the similarity to French and Italian) that is the primary language of around 40,000 people in Switzerland.

I have Swiss francs, but it did not have any British pounds.  So, I went to a currency exchange located inside the World Trade Center and asked for 300 pounds.  I was happy to receive the cash in 20 pound notes.

I don't know whether or not the U.K. has started to issue banknotes with the portrait of King Charles, but these crisp bills still had the face of Queen Elizabeth.

When I turned a bill over, I did not recognize the person pictured on the back.

At first I did not notice the name printed in small type to the side, but after studying the bill a moment, I recognized the image in the background as one of the paintings by J.M.W. Turner, an important 19th century English painter and a precursor to Impressionism.

Moneywise, we are now set for the trip.

By the way, I converted these photos to black and white because I did not want to possibly violate any anti-counterfeiting laws!