The Slovenian euro coin designs, revisited

This is a kind of postscript to my last year's rant about the Slovenian euro coin designs.

Well, on Friday (two days ago) I went to the Bank of Slovenia and bought the new 2007 mint set of the Slovenian euro coins. What a foolish thing to have done — I should have known that all the retired people of Slovenia would be besieging the bank, since they have nothing better to do than to wait in queues and try to get the euro coins a few days earlier than everyone else. One old hag even tried to pay part of the price of the collectors' mint set with coins from the starter set (44 coins in a transparent bag, intended to equip the population with some euro change to make the transition to the euro somewhat smoother), and couldn't get it into her head that until the 1st of January 2007, the Slovenian euro coins aren't money but just moneylike pieces of metal, and that she cannot buy anything with them until then. Grrr. And after I got home, I received an e-mail from the Bank of Slovenia, offering the possibility to order a set by mail since I had responded to one of their earlier notifications about the sets. Aargh! Why can't they set up a proper e-commerce web site and start publishing information about their offerings well in advance, rather than (the way they do now) updating their website only a few days after they start selling something (preferrably after everything has been sold out)?!

Anyway, the reason why I'm writing this post is that I now have the actual coins in my hands, while the rant from last year was written just on the basis of the PDF file with the designs, so I thought it would be good to add my impressions of the actual coins themselves. Well, I have the impression that the PDF file made the designs look a bit worse than they turned out on the real coins — they don't look *quite* as bad on the coins as they did in the PDFs. However, I still think that they look too busy and crowded, and too diverse in style. And of course most of my complaints from last year have to do with the choice of the motifs, not with the execution itself, so that those complaints remain unchanged.

One additional complaint that I didn't think of last year is that the 50 cent coin includes the zodiacal sign corresponding to the day when Slovenia declared independence. As some people have pointed out, this is really quite silly and looks somewhat like an endorsement of astrology on part of our government.