Coin Collecting - Coin Album

I remember I saw some coin albums in the stationery shop when I was a small kid. Since then, I had this thought, I wanted to collect coins. So, I started to put the coins I have into one small ceramic container. From one container, it started to grow until I have 3 containers. I kept only the coins minted before 1989. Whenever I went out to buy things, I would give paper notes, so that I could get coins as change. For this practice, I ended up with many coins. My family benefited from that, I told them they could spend the coins minted after 1988. 

However, I couldn't find coin album in the stationery shops here when I started to try to get serious, to arrange the coins the proper way. Searching Lazada and Rakuten, no online stores sell coin album. So, I expanded the search and found Ebay. I chose the cheapest price with free shipping, and asked my brother to buy it for me because I didn't have Paypal. The total cost was less than RM20, not cheap, but not so expensive either. That was my first coin album, I didn't check properly the dimension first. The slots in the album were only suitable for one cent to ten cents coins, twenty cents and above were too big for the slots. Anyway, the slots quantity were enough for my collections of one cent, five cents and ten cents only.

my first coin album (bought from Ebay)

My one cent collections. The colour of the coins were different due to the different level of oxidation, fascinating, I wondered it passed through how many hands before it reached me.

now obsolete one cent  

Before I started to sort it into the coin album, I poured all the coins into a bin and used detergent to clean it. Well, most of the stains on the coins were very stubborn, I tried to use scour pad, but apart from making my hands wrinkly, the stains still remained there. Well, I gave up and dried it. The stains gave the coins some characters, one of a kind. LOL!

cleaning coins inside a bin

dried the coins

After the Ebay purchase, I still got other coins in container, I was thinking to buy from Ebay again. Then, Taobao was having a RMB2 direct shipping deals. After calculating, it was cheaper than buying from Ebay. I bought from Ebay initially for the free shipping so I didn't have to get the shock of life when I got the shipping bill. With the RMB2 direct shipping deals, I didn't have to worry about the shipping, so I bought two coin albums. This time around, I checked the slots dimension, it's a 30mm X 27mm slot coin album. Bigger slots than my first coin album. For the two coin albums, it's was just over RM20 (including shipping). I wanted to buy three initially, however, I was worried that it might weight over 1 kg, so two finally. From the shipping company plastic bag info, I could see that the sender sent the package with Best Express (百世汇通) to the Taobao warehouse, then the package was sent from Taobao to Malaysia by ZTO Express (中通速递). I got it two weeks after I paid for it. I was starting to think that it might get lost somewhere in the ocean when my brothers got their items earlier than me although I bough the items earlier. One brother got a sling bag and another brother got a multimeter and a set of soldering set. Well, if Taobao keep offering RMB2 direct shipping deals, we all might spend more money on non-essential (not necessary) items. Dangerous 危ない! 

Anyway, below photo was my first purchase from Taobao. Hahaha, my first purchase from Taobao and Ebay were both coin album!

subsequent coin albums from Taobao