And then, finally, something completely different that sort of tops my whole weekend. Some of you know that one of my hobbies is eurobilltracking, which means that there’s a website where you can record the serial numbers of your euro notes to see whether someone else has already done that somewhere in the Eurozone. If not, you just wait after registering yours and hope that they will some day end up in the hands of another eurobilltracker, let’s say in Greece or Finland or wherever. If and when that happens, you get an e-mail from the site, telling you who has found your note, how far it has travelled in how many days, producing a so-called “hit”. At the moment there are about sixty thousand trackers and 8 million registered notes, producing some 17000 hits. That is a whopping amount, but quite a lot of the notes travel within only one country. So, imagine my surprise and happiness when I got an e-mail saying that someone had found my note in the United States. Just look at that! I’ve registered the note more than two years ago here in Brussels, and I have anticipated a shopping trip to Maastricht where I may have spent the note. And now someone has found it in the States, after the note has been in circulation for 779 days and travelled 6000 kilometres. That’s a rare treat. Happy! If you want to give it a try, please have a look here – you can access the site in 11 languages.

This is where my note travelled.