For no particular reason, I was looking around for scans of banknotes, probably driven by a link over at Metafilter (‘Ever seen a $100,000 bill?‘).
I ended up looking for the Dutch 25 and 100 guilders bills. The first one was released in 1989 and I fondly recall having one of the first 25 bills in my hand when I was attending a computer fair. A couple of Belgiums (Belgians?) were eager to accept those new bills because they thought it was just another great Dutch invention (I said this cynically: you have to know the history of Belgium and The Netherlands. In short: Belgium was once part of The Netherlands).
As for the hundred bill: it was introduced in 1992 and I remember the support of the bills slightly waned when there were rumours that the bill wasn’t ‘waterproof’. It’s still a neat bill though: the first time I showed it to a bank in local Truro, they looked at me suspiciously. Gold and silver lining on a papernote? Go away! Too bad the scan doesn’t really show all the glitter of the bill.
But anyways, I didn’t know they had paper notes over at Antartica. They’re just as colourful as the Dutch ones. Naturally, I loved the European Euros when I saw them the first time. You have to see them in real of course, to know what I mean: if there was a European version of the Monopoly game, those Euros would be my first choice. They’re just as tiny as they are shown in the scans.
