the mighty buck

My small two star hotel in Tashkent changes money. Makes it a lot easier than trying to find money changers or black market changers or even an ATM which aren't as plentiful as I was lead to believe by the guide book. They are offering a rate of 1500 Uzbekistan Zum to $1. That’s a tiny bit less than what the official rate was when I looked it up two months ago so it sounds good to me.

Their largest bill is a 1000 Zum. So changing $20 gets me 30000 Zums, all in 1000 denominations. I changed $40.

I have run into the 'bad dollar’ syndrome before and all the guidebooks warn you that you must come with new money, nothing more than a couple of years old, nothing torn or dirty or wrinkled or written on in any fashion. I always find this such a crock because they give you these horribly wrinkled, torn, smelly, dirty money in exchange but they examine each U.S. bill as if it has just come off the printing press and that is indeed what they want. It was pretty much the same here.

I pulled out $40 and she didn’t like either one of them. To me, they had both looked pretty good but she thought the face on them was too worn. Pulled out another, she found a mark on it, pulled out a fourth and she found a slight tear on the back. I pulled out one more and then told her that was all I had. She went through all of them and picked two but she still wasn’t happy with them. She consulted with a colleague and held them up to the light and tsk tsked a lot and asked me for more but I said no more. She finally took two and gave me my 60100 Zum. My wallet looks pregnant.