In My Mattress

I hate walking around with change in my pocket, so I never leave the house with it, and every time I walk in the door, the first thing I do is empty any change I have in my pockets into a jar on my desk.

In the six years I have been in Tokyo, that jar has overflowed many times, and soon my change filled a suitcase. In the past month I have made several trips to the bank, lugging along as much as I can carry each time. Only one trip left.

I suppose when this is all done I shoudl take the bank teller out to dinner. Each time I go it takes about an hour of sifting through dirty coins, cakced with bird-crap, to remove any non-Japanese coins, or other little trinkets. There were enough feathers in there to make another small bird.

I'm supprised at how many foreign coins I had in there, and I have no idea where they came from. I did take a trip to Canada a couple years back, so I can explain this Canadian penny, but there was also Korean, Thai, Chinese, and even one coin from some arabic speaking country (I couldn't read it to tell where)

Anyway, I can't figure out what to do with all these coins. I can't throw them out, because it's money, but I really have no way to use them, and they are too small to exchange for yen. So there they go right back into the loose-change jar, waiting to be discovered again in six years.

BTW, the current count is about 550,000 yen. (roughly $5,200)