en Finlandia

1 & 2 Finnish Euro-cent coins

Tuesday June 15th, 2010. 10:11 AM. [Finland culture]. 4 Comments.

2 years ago, we were in Barcelona for a touristic visit. A couple of days visiting the typical highlights: Sagrada Familia, Ramblas, shops in Avenida Diagonal, Raval, Gaudí and finally also Montjuic. There we stopped in a terrace to have a break. The waiter was nice and later on she asked where we were from (yes, many times they considered me also foreigner). When we said she was from Finland, she couldn’t avoid to get excited:

- Yeah? Could be that you have some Finnish cents coins? 1 and 2 cents of euros, that are the only ones that I’m missing to complete my collection.

And no, we didn’t have.

Finland doesn’t have 1 and 2 cents coins. In Finland (and later Netherlands), they thought it didn’t have too much sense to have them, because it costs more to produce them than their value and usefulness. So they use the Swedish rounding system: 1,2 cents are round down to 0, and 3 and 4 cents round up to 5.

Sometimes it happened that I had 1 and 2 cents coins from Spain and I when I tried to use them in Finland they have accept them, but they told me that the rule is that can accept them, but not return these kind of coins.

And if that Barcelona waiter would want, it’s possible to buy these kind of Finnish coins for collectionists.