So loving my new Canon!

Just a few pictures from this past weekend at the Esteros del Ibera in northern Argentina. I went with Martha, a friend from Corvallis, and her partner Elizabeth who are here in Argentina on vacation. We had a great time and I can't wait to go back sometime with Julian!

I had great fun taking pictures with our new camera - I've posted some on Picasa:

http://picasaweb.google.com/erikaadamsbackup/EsterosDelIbera?authkey=Gv1sRgCI7l1ZaY1K2XLw&feat=directlink

Hi everyone!

I finally uploaded the photos from our trip to Misiones (northeastern corner of Argentina; we live in Entre Rios) at the end of February. We had a fantastic time and, er, took a few pictures... Enjoy!





http://picasaweb.google.com/erikaadamsbackup/TripToMontecarloMisionesArgentina?authkey=Gv1sRgCL-E_a-j0_3UxQE&feat=directlink

(You can also click on the link at the lower right side of this page.)

Oh, but there is no Panacea...

So, Carrefour sucks too, just differently. We ended up buying the fridge there (ahhh, pretty fridge that cools my food and drink ever so nicely...). To make a long, frustrating story short, the system for purchasing items at Carrefour is designed to make it so complicated and difficult that you don't want to buy there. I kid you not. Sadly, they could learn a few things from Wal-mart. At any rate, to get our 20% discount on the fridge, we had to bring a friend of ours and her Special Bank credit card to the store to buy the fridge (ha, ha, yes, we did have to pay her back). We didn't find out until it was almost all over that our very nice and incredibly patient friend was having friends over for dinner that night and she hadn't started cooking... We're soooo sorry patient friend. :( At any rate, by the time the Carrefour people figured out all the paperwork, which involved 3 groups of people in 3 different places, where group 1 screwed things up so that groups 2 and 3 in painfully slow sucession had to go back and figure out what group 1 had done and fix it (groups 2 and 3 speak different languages and don't play well together), the whole process had taken almost 2 hours. To buy a fridge. With a credit card. From a local bank. We were wearing shoes and shirts. We walked out of there wondering what the heck had just happened to us.

But, the story goes on. The even better part came the next morning, when Julian went to buy the 15% off range/oven (with the Carrefour credit card, which you could apply for the very same day) while I went to return the cell phone we had bought a few days before, for which we were being charged 2x the per minute price we were promised... Again, to make a long story short, Julian figured out while talking to the Carrefour credit card application lady that, the way everything is set up (truly, not worth explaining), you end of paying 1% MORE for the oven (i.e., 101%, not 85%) by taking advantage of the 15% off deal. I got there when Julian was finishing up his chat with the credit card app lady. She had a sursprised smile on her face while Julian explained incredulously that the deal was a sham and sucked raw eggs. I rather suspect that the lady's smile was because J was the first person to actually figure this all out. So, the moral of this story is, study your percents and monthly/annual interest rates girls and boys, otherwise you'll get snookered by asshole companies looking to steal your hard earned moola... Needless to say, we did not buy the range/oven at Carrefour.

Crap, I can't decipher what she wrote...

So, a quick rant about the latest blip in the moving process.

(Cultural note: when you rent here, you literally just rent the empty shell of the house - you need to bring your own fridge, range, and even, occasionally, light fixtures, etc. with you. The house we're moving into doesn't have either a range or fridge. Now, back to my rant...)

Very few appliance stores post the appliance prices (actually appliance stores aren't the only ones, but I don't want to unnecessarily sully the names of innocent vendors by speaking in generalities...). What they do post is the monthly payment for buying the item in 13 "easy" payments. However, you can't just pull out your handy-dandy calculator and multiply the payments by 13, because the installment price includes interest (and lots of it). What this means is that you get to have a charming sales person, who has to trot back to the computer to look up every single price to you ask for, wander around the store with you. Quite helpfully, he/she writes all of this information down for you (legibly, or otherwise, as happened to me). Aside from the fact that this procedure adds what seems like forever to the price/feature comparison process, the principle, to but it bluntly, pisses me off. I, and most people in this world, hate feeling like I'm being manipulated or tricked. In theory, they could take one look at me and adjust their prices accordingly (actually, given the state of my wardrobe, this might actually help more than hurt!). Not only that, but they are willfully wasting my time in the interest of not committing to a single price. I don't have time to waste! Who does?? So, what can I do to get around this? Buy at Carrefour, a French-owned Wal-mart-esque megastore chain that posts the total price along with the montly payment rate. So much for buying local. :-(