Money shot #8: When mustaches ruled the earth v.2
This post is something of a revival of a long-defunct feature on this site: the Money shot. It’s also emblematic of the extreme changes in my uses of discretionary time that have resulted from our move to Sofia that the post comes a half-year after the trip that generated it. Believe me when I say that the moment I handled these waxy plastic bills — along with Australia, New Zealand, China, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Thailand, and Mexico, Romania’s money is printed on a futuristic polymer substrate — my first thought was, Money shot post. That that thought passed through my tiny head in early August, well, hell.
Romania has always fascinated me linguistically and geographically, given its odd bastard-stepchild status w/r/t both the Romance and Slavic families and their stories. The friend we visited in Bucharest during our 18-hour dine-&-dash through that bizarre, alarming, and vibrant city, was able to speak interestingly and knowledgeably about the language, culture, and history of the often ill-used place, and it will always remain a place of interest to me. But during that visit we had one main interest, and that was buying a bed for Aleksander.
Recalling this errand invokes a feeling of timewarp, because just these scant months later it is hard to believe that Alek ever slept in a crib, but when we arrived in Bulgaria Alek was bedless — we had decided that he’d be ready for the rite of passage of moving from crib to bed, so his crib became a casualty of the move. Our idea was to locate an IKEA once we were settled in Sofia, and some googling told us that there was one in Bucharest, where a former colleague and friend of Magda’s had recently taken up residence.
About the currency itself:
During the 17th century, Dutch daalder bearing a lion (leeuwendaalder) circulated in the Romanian principalities; they were often called lei (lions). The name was kept as a generic term for money, and became the official name of the national currency in 1867 after several attempts to impose a more nationalist name, such as român (cf. franc) or romanat (cf. ducat). The Bulgarian lev has the same etymology.
While this bill is reasonably valuable relative to the resources that went into its makeup, it’s worth noting that it is an updated, zero-deprived version of the earlier one million Lei note, which briefly enjoyed the distinction of being the most worthless banknote you could have in your wallet — interestingly, right around the time we were millionaires in Turkish specie, which was a competitor for the Romanian honor at the time.
Nowadays, 1 Romanian le[u?] = €0.23 — where’s the shame in that?
Like his predecessor in these pages, the man on this note was famous for his literary contributions to his nation. Mustache-wise, who crushes who(m): Romania’s handlebarred Ion Luca Caragiale above or the New World wildness of Uruguay’s Juan Zorilla de San Martín?
The Romanian ’stache wins because it doesn’t need a lousy beard to hold it up. And it complements the awesome eyeglass frames nicely. Uruguay, however, wins the eyebrow contest.
Comment by juliloquy — Friday 13 February 09 @ 00.43 MST+2.00
Romania’s ’stache all the way.
Comment by jane — Friday 13 February 09 @ 02.52 MST+2.00
Yeah, whatever HAPPENED to pince-nez?! They totally rawk.
Comment by gaoo — Friday 13 February 09 @ 04.01 MST+2.00