Bottle Capitalism

Just in case you were under the illusion that we spent every day of our travels hauling our kids from one fantastic attraction to another, allow me to share with you one of their favorite activities while traveling - playing "store" in the hotel room, using found bottle caps as currency. (For those of you reading in America, what they call "bottles" in Southeast Asia are these strange containers made from real glass, it seems, and topped off not with plastic, but with a strange crimped metal thing that you have to use a special tool to remove. Weird, huh...?)



It started out with Zekey, who spent his time while waiting for food to come in restaurants searching for caps, and quickly spread to the two other kids. Once they realized that there were tiny numbers printed on the inside of each cap, the game quickly mushroomed into a bona fide obsession. Letters were soon discovered, and these represented hundreds and then thousands.

We may be sorely negligent with our home schooling curriculum, but I think the boys crammed about a year and a half worth of long sum addition into two weeks of competing to see who's bottle cap collection was worth more. I have no idea what the airport security people thought about the approximately 1,568 bottle caps that were strewn throughout our luggage at one point, but I know I got a kick out of it.