I opted not to go to the coin show this weekend. It wasn’t a week where I had Friday off and we have a crazy week coming up and I just mentally opted for a quieter weekend of getting chores done and hitting up a birthday party with the kids instead.

But I thought I’d sit down and share a bit about my latest ~$20 tangent into the realm of, “well, that looks nifty!”

One of the same dealers that I bought several raw Italian coins from also had some circa 1980 Chinese coins going as individual coins or as small lots of three and I decided to try for and win seven of them at a net cost of about $1 per coin.

When they came in and I showed them to Shandy she asked if I got them because of her and because I thought she’d find them neat since she’d spent most of the last 2.5 years doing remote English lessons for Chinese children. I was honest in that I thought she might find them interesting for that reason, but I honestly just got them because I thought they looked neat and they worked as a stupid, fun, impulse buy for about what some people spend on a coffee.

The funny thing I feel with these is, I’m not sure the coins are actually any more interesting than most other modern coins issued by the US or other countries that I tend to pass on, but they don’t immediately strike me as ugly (looking at you, Ukraine and Swaziland) and they are different enough from what I’m used to to make them interesting to stop and look at.

I ended up with a bit of a mix with a 1 fen, 2 fen, three 5 fens, and two 1 Jiao (10 fen), with dates ranging from 1979 to about 1991.

Much later - just recently - I decided to place an order from a dealer with a bunch of 1 fen, 2 fen, 5 fen and 1 Jiao coins in a variety of dates - listing most for $1 each with minimal per coin shipping fees if you were buying several coins. I haven’t gotten those in yet but I’m hoping the examples I get will look as nice as what was in the pictures and that the seller was being honest in saying that the coins would be packed to prevent them from damaging each other in shipment. I spent about $15 for 13 coins to broaden out the set a bit and have these fill up a 20-coin page in one of my binders. The seller also had some 5 Jiao coins but the pictures on those specifically left me doubting that the coins would look good in-hand. Those coins have a different metal composition, and the images make them look like they’d been stored or handled poorly.

I will admit to having sat on and debated actually pulling the trigger on this purchase for several weeks even though the price and the images looked good just because the seller includes all sorts of language in the listing that I normally consider a red flag - they come off like a whiner and a drama-llama in a major way that has a victim-complex because some of their customers have apparently been mean to them about shipping times and not leaving feedback. Lol Anyway. I decided to take a shot in the dark and decided I was willing to risk $15 and the possibility of a longer wait on low-priority items and MAYBE some drama. We’ll see if, in about 2 weeks, I’m kicking myself for not listening to the warning signs and steering clear. I’m usually not TOO prickly about shipping times as long as it doesn’t seem like the seller dragged their feet shipping it out and I do actually leave feedback, so they shouldn’t end up hating me too much.

So just an entry in the “Oh! Neat!” category and coins from another country to bore the kids with as they age.

My wife is trying to convince me to start doing cruise reviews that are equal to the work I do on my coin and note sets... I'm not sold. I enjoy this. That sounds like work.