YES, Bulgaria, like many other countries has problems with funny money. But hats off to General Borissov and his boys as they bash the Bulgarian funny money printers! They have done quite a good job and one must give credit when it is due.

Yet, as anyone who has ever changed money here knows, real money gets quite a scrutiny before it is accepted and changed.

We've had some pretty interesting times with this. Once back the late 1980s we went to the former Vitosha Hotel to change some green stuff into other colored stuff. One of the $20 banknotes we gave the cashier had a bit of tape on it, quite unknown to us. This most astute teller wrinkled up her nose and held the offending banknote between two fingers as if it was flu infected tissue. "This money has tape on it! I cannot accept it!" she exclaimed with disgust. "Really, where?" I asked. "It's right here!" she noted with a tone of offended authority in her voice as she pointed to a small bit of tape less than a centimetre square. "Then why don't you take it off?" I offered. The clerk looked at me as if I'd just started speaking Chinese or Swahili, but she finally did take it off and change it into leva.

Another time we flew into Sofia from San Francisco after some time in the States with new banknotes. We needed to buy some furniture for our apartment from a friend that was leaving Bulgaria. He needed to buy an airline ticket immediately with part of the cash we brought and required it fresh out of our money belt.

Unfortunately, one of the results of sitting on a flight from California for hours and wrestling luggage through any airport in June is sweat. The three banknotes we needed to give him were sopping wet along with everything else in my money belt.

He took the bills to partially pay for the ticket but the clerk was very suspicious of the dripping dollars. "What is this? Why is this money wet?" he exclaimed. My friend offered the truth, which the ticket clerk was not exactly willing to accept. I walked over to the ticket counter. "Look, I just got off of a flight with the money. We had no dollar printing press with us on the plane. The dollars are from a bank in America. They are wet from my sweat. See?" And I opened up my smelly, soaking sports jacket to reveal the facts of the matter. This did the trick as the dank dollars were finally dried a bit and accepted.

We've also had some very strange comments from banks in the States. Once we went to get cash out of our account there and requested clean, new dollars with no bends, wrinkles, tears, ink spots, stains, bleached out spots, dots, dirt or anything else on them. The teller looked at me as if I had just came in from Mars. "Look, we live in Bulgaria. You can't change money there unless it is spotless and in near mint condition," I explained. The friendly teller said she'd be happy to comply but asked me why. "It's the counterfeit problem. A lot of money in Bulgaria is funny money and if the bills are new they usually take them without question.

"Hmm," she pondered. "Do the banks there know that most counterfeit dollars look like they are new bills? Why would any counterfeiter make sloppy banknotes with marks all over them?" she explained patiently. "Usually, the phony bills look as good as, or better than, mint ones. In fact, older banknotes that are somewhat used are rarely, if ever, counterfeit."

"Please don't tell this to the money changers in Bulgaria" I laughed, "or we'd never be able to get anything changed!"

Yep, it does become a game sometimes. We get banknotes from our bank here, go to change them and if one change bureau doesn't want them we just go around the corner to the next one. Must depend on how slow business is on any given day.

It is kind of fun to watch them inspect the bills. Hey, it's okay. We know ours are good, but what about the leva we're given in change? I've never ever had a change bureau inspect them.

One day we had a particularly difficult time changing a $50 bill with a red splotch on it. In the States no one would ever even look at it twice, but here...well, that's another story. After going to three different change bureaus without success, I figured it would be best just to launder the money. Yes, I went home, soaked the offending banknote in soapy water and scrubbed off the mark of doom. After drying it out with my wife's hairdryer I went back and changed it at the first change place I'd been at that day. What they didn't know didn't hurt them.

But the best was to come. Immediately following my money laundering, I walked to the post office to send a fax. After it went through I paid for it with the leva I'd just received from the cleansed cash. The clerk handed back the two leva note to me and said, "I can't accept this money. It is torn!"