This July was the Singapore Coins and Notes Museum‘s first birthday! It meant free entry for the first week from the 1st till 5th July. Heh, heh. Thus, the Adventure Crew hit the place up to learn about money. Also, because I prebooked a slot since we’d get a discount on “making” money.
The place is kinda hidden and you might miss it if you didn’t see the little stand with coins and the museum’s sign. The address is 2 Trengganu Street, Level 3 with the entrance at Pagoda street. Hmm! It’s actually across the Chinatown heritage centre and it’s pretty much next to a foodcourt. Get through the unassuming looking doorway!
If you pressed the second floor, you’d end up at some cigar shop of sorts. Anyway, to the third floor! The lift is pretty cool, since it’s old fashioned including the buttons! I liked pressing the buttons.
The admission fee for adults is $10 while it’s $6 for students, senior citizens, NSF and children. Since we came during their birthday, it was free, freeee. We just got the stickers to show that we paid for the money making course we booked for that day. Heh.
In reality, it is not that empty at the museum. There were a lot of people who came around then. I just waited till they were in the other section to take this picture. The museum owns two levels in which we went to the upper one so we could start off with our money making session.
It’s not really real money. We’re making a plaster mold of a coin! Technically this is the first process before a coin is minted in real life. They make a large mold first before doing the other processes of making a metal version of it and all.
Heh, we followed the instructions of the museum guide and then we left the liquid plaster to dry. Meanwhile, we checked out the museum as we followed her around telling us the history and whatnot of the various coins and currency of Singapore and the world.
Fun note: We checked it out while wearing plastic aprons because we didn’t want to bother undoing them while we waited for our plaster to dry.
She led us around the two floors and told us how some coins were used for luck or if you see in right picture, that’s used in Malay weddings to show who the “staff” are. Nowadays you don’t really see this but I’ve seen it being used before, it always made me go, “Gaaaah, so expensive. GASP! GASP! How much did they use?”.
Though, I guess it makes sense because the ones who use it like that are usually family members of the bride/groom and are helping out with it and in the end, they’d get that to keep for their efforts, I guess?
Also, there’s a little screening room there. Yes, those are coins flying out of the Singapore Mint. It was about how the money gets minted and how the circulation of currency goes etc. It’s a pretty informative film that we went “Ooooh!” especially when the coins kept flying out of various places like creepy flying coins.
After which, we wandered around since we still had time for a looksee while waiting for the plaster to dry. If you don’t know, Brunei and Singapore has equal currency so we can interchange with one another. That’s why sometimes you might get the chance of a Brunei dollar if you’re buying things and getting change here.
There were a lot of special coins. Some of them you could buy, others are too rare for you to get. The Harry Potter coin from Tuvalu is official and expensive like woah including the Megatron Transformer coin.
Also, they had bars of gold/silver/copper and tools on how the coins are made.
Meanwhile, we each got a blank token to put into a machine to see it minted! If you see the left coin that’s already minted, that’s the front of it and is similar to our plaster mold!
Ok. Two coins came out, there was an error that day for us. In reality, I think the coin we put in just triggers the machine to do it similar like how a REAL minting machine would do it but the coins are already prefabricated in it or something.
So we learnt about colour coins, special tokens and whatnot. I found the coin above to be cool. Although it says $2 on each piece, it is worth more than that since it’s made of silver. You can see the patterns are different since I took a picture of the back and front. Anyway, by that time, we hoped our plaster molds were dry and headed up again.
Back out to the outdoor roof thing. Yeah, you can actually see Chinatown and the streets from there. Anyway, we were to just dry up the excess moisture of our plaster with the towels and I kind of pressed too hard and felt a crack.
“Oh… good grief. I think… I cracked mine,” I said.
But it’s ok since it wasn’t that bad and I could glue it up. Raven Silver‘s broke into four pieces or something. The others were ok. Ha. Anyway, we painted ours up and well, since we DID see the official coins having pieces that join up together, we decided to just make it like that.
Tada! Well, you get to use the acrylic set you were given in the goodie bag. Also, the guide wanted to give me and Raven a completed blank piece since we broke ours but we said it is ok… FOR WE MADE THIS OURS.
Yes.
If you decide to do yours. Uh, don’t press too hard, ok?
This is breaking money.
