Back to business!

Did you know that the unit of currency in Turkmenistan is the "manat"?

Here's a picture of one of them.



But this won't get you past the bouncer at a typical downtown Atamyrat house/trance/techno music club.

Here's a bigger note (with a cool picture of Sapa) to try:



Betcha think that will do! Well the latest exchange rate from Bloomberg is:

1.00 US DOLLAR (USD) = 5148 TURKMENISTAN MANAT (TMM)

Think you can get into a decent club for less than two bucks? Think again buddy!

Anyway, to get to the point, your financial analyst on the spot is having second thoughts about the used carpet business - who wants to buy a smelly old rug anyway. And carpet cleaning rates are going through the roof here as everyone is jumping on the same bandwagon (whatever that means). Why it's gone up to over 500 manats per rug - who can make a living with that sort of overhead, I ask you?

So Aardvark is now thinking of starting a new coffee retail outlet with WiFi internet access with the name Galaxymanats - whadya think?

The only competition will be the single franchise outlet of the Seatlle folk in the camel dropping recycling area south of Little Sydney. But only camels like Betsy and Mandy frequent it - without the stock portfolio of a well heeled camel, it's not possible for your average Turkmen on the streets to stump up for a Latte Grande - why it would cost almost 2 of those splendid notes above!

So the first thing is to decide on what serving sizes to use. As the competition uses Tall, Grande and Venti®, we need something different here (especially for the later as the Seattlians have gone and trade marked it).

Send your ideas. A free mid-sized (name to be determined) latte on the day we open for the winner if I don't go for my own ideas, which I probably will.

Let's get Galaxymanats on the world coffee outlet map!

(By the way, the eagle eyed among you will have spotted the spelling mistake on the notes above - like that extra Y in the country name. Printing mistakes like that are normally worth loads - if I were you, I'd get hold of as many manats as you can before someone spots this mistake and orders a mass reprinting and destruction of old notes. Once that happens, some of these notes could be worth thousands of manats each!)