Mmm… What’s cooking? Well – for one extremely unfortunate Colombian family living in Spain who stored their savings in the oven – about $25,000 in cash.
This is the story of a photographer from the Colombian city of Cali who, over a period of several years, had been sending money to his brother in Spain. The brothers had planned to save enough money to buy a small property together in the European country.
After having collected together a fairly bulky wad of notes, the Spanish-dwelling brother realized he would need a clever hiding place for the money and – making a decision that any one of us might make – stored the bank notes in his house’s little-used oven.
Disaster struck, however, when the man left his home to collect his brother from the airport and his wife and children decided to cook the visitor a welcoming meal… not realizing that, along with the lasagna, $25,000 worth of Colombian bank notes were also cooking.
The family spent the night trying to reconstruct the burned bills and the silver lining on a rather dark cloud is that the they have been able to get back half of the total sum of money from the bank, as many of the notes were still somewhat recognizable.
The admirably optimistic Colombian told reporters, “I don’t regret it. What happens, happens.”