Yesterday we were having a wander around the Charlottenburg and Schöneberg districts of Berlin. We ended up at Nollendorf Platz and its U-Bahn station. We were about to go home from here but stopped at the adjacent supermarket to pick up some stuff.
I had the dog with me so I had to stay outside. As I waited I kicked around in the dust to kill time. I noticed something a bit unusual in the dust but ignored it for a while. I see stuff on the ground all the time that look like coins but they are always bottle tops. This thing wasn't a coin though - it looked to me to be a small lump of gold. Couldn't be. Could it?
Eventually my curiosity got the better of me and I picked up the thing. A feeling of 'eeeeeew' came over me when I realised it was a gold crown! EEEEW. All I could think of was it falling out of someones decayed mouth.
I thought about it briefly and wondered if it was gold, how much would it be worth and what should I do with it. Certainly I couldn't reconcile it with its owner and it seemed stupid to throw it back on the ground. I put it in my pocket and felt a bit weird about it.
In a nearby shopping centre is one of those 'Gold Buyers' that buy old jewellery - an Australian company. I didn't want to keep the crown so I took it there. I really felt quite horrible about this. Thoughts about World War II and the forced extraction of people's dental gold (amongst other things) for personal gain made me feel quite uneasy - but stuff it, I would still ask the question at the gold buyer anyway.
The gold buyer had no qualms with the tooth and immediately said 'oh this is dental gold'. People must do it all the time. He did some tests - scratched it on a surface, dropped some solution on the residue and determined it was 16 Carat gold.
He weighed the crown and it wasn't much gold, only 1.3 grams. He said that equalled 14 Euros. I thought it should be worth more than that, but not a whole lot more, so agreed to take the 14 Euros.
What a weird episode of our time in Berlin. Quick and dirty money.
What would you have done?
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