The notes I ordered about a week or so ago have arrived and they’re starting to clear our quarantine period so I’m finally getting to take a closer look at what I bought… and the are not 2016 bond notes.

The bond notes actually say “Bond Note” and that’s the one modification / omission these 2019 issues make (other than the date) that separates them from the Bond notes.

I’m laughing to myself because this is 100% my bad for not noticing. The seller’s listing listed them as “P NEW 2019.” The pictures and the labels said 2019… I just was assuming and taking for granted that all the notes that looked like this were the same and were all bond notes and I’d been completely unaware of the fact that the government / RBZ actually did release these like they said they would but they re-used the design of the bond notes – something they never did before.

I talked about this with the 3^rd and 4^th dollars. When the 4^th dollars were rolled out (even though they were VERY short-lived, even by Zimbabwe standards) the government significantly changed those designs and made sure that the new notes had color schemes that were very different than the 3^rd dollar notes of the same denomination to make darn sure that no one would get the two mixed up or use them interchangeably.

I never would have expected them to do this.

That said, even though these aren’t bond notes, they’re basically identical, and I’m finally getting to look at these designs in person, with the note in hand, and, dang, I think these are pretty. This really just makes me even more bummed that the $10 and $20 notes keep not getting released. I would have loved to have seen what they had planned for those. How dare the people of this poor, long suffering, country get in the way of my collecting fun, right?!? First World Problems, man.