Dollar dollar bills, y'all.

This week I won a bet that Monrovia's classiest hotel would not accept local currency.

Let me repeat: there is a place twenty minutes from the airport that won't take a Liberian dollar (LD).

I kinda felt like a jerk setting the waiter up, slipping him 50 USD and 100 LD, forcing him to turn back to ask, "Madame, do you have a...different kind of dollar...instead?" He couldn't bring himself to say what I already knew.

A little background information:

1. There are no coins in Liberia.

2. Old LDs look like rice paper marinating in a jock strap. 

This is not the first time I've encountered bill snobbery. A woman was buying oranges from the backseat of her car (yeah...) and, upon receiving dirty "pieces" (small bills) in change, said: "I can hate to give clean money to the market women, oh!" The market woman just laughed. Crisp bills, I gather, only circulate among the well-heeled, with their wallets and ATM receipts. LDs get reserved for buying street produce, or tipping bartenders, or buying gum from the backseat of your car (yeah...), or paying off checkpoint cops, or thanking gardeners for jump-starting your car.

I thought I understood the system until the other day, when a street vendor tried to charge me a fee for buying pineapple with USD. My face somehow conveyed a "WTF, dude." Evidently, acquiring goods with USDs is kind of a pain in the ass where he lives.