The 50 Ruble Coin...Oh Russia! TGIF!

I am not really a coin collector. I do love a good pressed penny machine where I get to manually press the penny by twisting the crank. OK, I also confess to having a little pressed penny coin book from Sea World from back in the day. I remember dragging my brother all around Sea World to help me find every one of those darn pennies with Shamu on them.

Instead of the old fashioned, do-it-yourself type machine, lately I have noticed a lot of new souvenir coin machines where you just put your money in and get a shiny new coin out of it. I have to admit, I have a couple of those too. I don't know what my deal is with souvenir coins but my slight obsession with silly coins is not really what I wanted to write about.

I was walking the girls the other day and I stumbled upon a really dingy coin on the ground. Now, typically, I don't pick these up. I honestly leave them lying on the ground for someone who is really in need of finding that last ruble they need to buy some food, or let's be realistic, vodka. However, when my parents were here, my dad picked up a few coins that I had not seen before. So, now I take a closer look at the coins I come across. I picked this one up, as I thought it looked unique. And, it was. I found a 50 Ruble coin! I had never seen one of these before. They have a 50 Ruble note, but I didn't know that a coin even existed. Mark did some digging online and, according to the little information he could find, the only year that these coins were made was in 1993, two years after the fall of the Soviet Union. Or, they could have been made in 1995 but have the year 1993 printed on them. Oh Russia... :)  50 Rubles is roughly worth $1.50 USD. I was really excited to find something so unique just lying on the ground. I attribute the fact that this coin was recently unearthed to all of the beautification they are doing around Adler for the Games. They have been doing a lot of digging lately as they are resurface walkways, add benches and garbage cans, replace the curbing along our little main road, and add new grass along the sidewalks. I think my little area of Adler will look quite nice come Games time.

While I am talking about cool coins we have collected while in Russia, I need to mention a couple more.

We had a friend in Moscow that called himself a "communist". Oleg  was a middle aged guy who lived in our neighborhood and was in love with our girls, Suay in particular. We would always meet each other in the park behind our flat and we do our best to chat with him. His English was about the same as our Russian...nearly non-existent at that time. Sometimes, we would exchange little gifts and one day he gave us this coin with Lenin on it. It's a 1 Ruble (3 cents) coin that is commemorating 100 years of Lenin's birth...1870-1970. Yes, the coin was minted in the Soviet Union in 1970! This coin is not rare, but it is special to us and we treasure it even more because of where it came from and who gave it to us.

While on our road trip this summer, we got a souvenir coin from an automated machine at Peter and Paul's Fortress in St. Petersburg. There were four coins to choose from or you could select the fifth option which would randomly choose one of the four coins for you. We couldn't decide which coin we liked more, so we decided to let the machine pick for us. For fun, before looking at the coin, we held the coin, together, in our hands trying to -feel- which coin we received. We both agreed and guessed  we would get the coin with the griffin on it...and we were right! Now it is our lucky St. Petersburg coin.

I also picked up a coin at Gorky Park while I was in Moscow last month with my parents. I chose the table tennis one because Mark likes to play table tennis.

Nothing too exciting about these souvenir coins except that they came from places that we like and they all hold certain memories in them. For not being coin collectors, we sure have some pretty awesome coins.