maybe some other time.

You may have suspected that I enjoy the process of shopping for, buying, and playing musical instruments. You may not have suspected that I enjoy it so much, I get really excited about helping other people shop for and buy musical instruments. I am limited in time, space, and money, but also the right instrument for me isn’t going to be the right one for anyone else. Five years ago I could not have imagined the violins I play now, which are…not persnickety, exactly. But you have to ask them the right way.

(I’ve tried some violins in the 1800-1875 range, and they are fascinating, but not so much that I want the project of owning one. They require maintenance, like your 1953 British motorcycle that leaks and burns a quart of oil every week. Very particular maintenance.)

It’s weird to anthropomorphize instruments, or anything else, but everything we make ends up with its own set of quirks so distinctive it makes more sense to just call it "personality." This is true with sailboats: on Outward Bound we sailed as a pair of 30’ wooden boats, built by the same people to the same pattern, but my boat topped out at 6 knots, while the other boat, in the same wind, would do 7 knots. Wood is obviously organic, but in the aggregate, it’s true of the 98%-synthetic Sunfish sailboats too.

We are fortunate to have some world-class instrument sales and service shops here, which is how I got to play a $110,000 guitar yesterday. It’s a 1940 Martin D-28, which my 70s Japanese pseudo-Martin so faithfully copies. I was not interested in playing it, but an older gentleman came in and asked to try it, and we got to chatting. He said "I would love this, but I don’t quite have the cash right now," which I would not have taken at face value before living here, where there’s a Ferrari dealership across from Taquería El Camarón.

(Until fairly recently it was also a Maserati and I think McLaren dealer. Maybe the pandemic forced them to cut back.)

I gathered he has more than a few Martins at home, collectible enough that $110,000 is a price range he’s familiar with. Aside from the starting challenge of having $110,000, it’s actually really hard to spend $110,000 on an ordinary performing guitar! If an instrument isn’t famous by association—like $1 million for a vintage guitar from Keith "I Can’t Believe I’m Not Dead By Now" Richards—you’ll have to call around just to find one. A gorgeous 1888 guitar (#SE-124) by Antonio de Torres, who more or less created the guitar as we know it, is entirely playable and costs $275,000. (Higher than they seem to sell for at auction.) By contrast, if you want a $275,000 violin, I know a couple local places off the top of my head that can probably give you several to try out. It’s not quite a joke when we say you can translate guitar prices to violins by adding a zero on the end.

ANYWAY.

This 1940 Martin really does glow, but only somewhat more than my not-Martin. It is loud, easily the loudest dreadnought I’ve ever heard. I played it briefly. And it’s…fine? It’s a vintage Martin D-28. I basically already have a vintage Martin D-28. And I’m not the world’s best guitar player, so it’s likely wasted on me unless/until I really put the time in to study the guitar in the way I’ve studied the violin. And by then, I might have developed a different (and certainly less expensive) taste.

I think $110,000 will buy me 1/3 of a Ferrari, though…

read read ready read

I finally bought a Kindle.

I hadn't really wanted one, or known I wanted one. We have a Paperwhite in the house, but the text has been just a bit too jaggy for me, and I already have an iPad and iPhone...

Amazon released the Kindle Voyage, which has some new experimental features (apparently you can press the edges to turn the page, and it vibrates?), but also has a 300dpi e-ink screen, which eliminates the jaggy-font problem. While I was hesitating because the Voyage is expensive and weird, Amazon upgraded the Paperwhite to the 300dpi screen, and I was so excited I had it sent to my in-laws' in Washington so it would arrive while we were there and I wouldn't have to wait.

The Kindle is totally awesome and I'm chewing through all my library books on it. After a couple days, though, I noticed it was doing this thing called spotlighting, where you can see the effects of the individual LED backlights. I would never have heard of it, except there was a generation of Mac laptops that had it quite severely:

It doesn't prevent me reading stuff, but I'm returning it anyway.

When I told Amazon's return process on the website that I wanted a replacement instead of a refund, they directed me (without comment) to Customer Service. Customer Service, it turns out, were themselves a bit confused about why I was talking to them, but they sent me to a "specialist," who via typing-chat walked me through her script of rebooting the Kindle and then facilitating the return.

"A specialty team will be in touch within 24 hours to schedule a pick-up of the device."

This is not normal. I've done a lot of Amazon returns: they give you a shipping label, you package the thing up and drop it off at the UPS Store, you're done.

It turns out all the extra hoops are because Amazon Engineering wants the broken device themselves.

serious shopping failure

[I started a blog post, and it turned into an essay. I'm hoping to finish it this week.]

I tried to support local business today. I really did. I wanted to get a sight for my bow, so that maybe I could actually hit something more than 30 yards away. (At shorter distances you do what's called "instinctive shooting," which is literally "Hey, that looks good. *twang*" but with lots of practice. For longer distances you have to sight against some fixed point on the bow, which means either using an actual sight, or sticking a piece of numbered tape on the bow so it's not just a piece of featureless wood with no markers to sight on.)

The people at Pacifica Archery are fantastic, but most people shoot compound bows, and that's most of what they carry. They only had two models of sight for recurve bows, nearly identical, and the same price.

1. I chose the nicer one first. The parts of the sight didn't actually fit together well enough to be usable.
2. I punted and chose the other one. It was machined so poorly the screw holes didn't even line up and it couldn't be mounted on the bow.

Okay, then. How much are new limbs for my bow? (It's a 35lb. draw, I'd like to go up to 40 or 45.)

After 30 years, the company stopped making that model when the economy tanked, and when they brought it back, they changed the specs, so they no longer sell limbs that fit my bow. So I'm looking at a new bow, whenever that becomes important to me.

Just to add insult to injury, the shop also didn't have any larger quivers I liked.

It's not anyone's fault, particularly. Just a massive conjunction of retail lossage. I felt bad, because I don't mind paying the premium to get advice and customer service and keep the local economy running, but I do require that they carry something I can actually buy.

but it was on sale!

This weekend we're having the WorldTeach mid-service gathering at Termas de Chillan, a hot springs/ski resort down south. I don't know exactly what I'm doing after that, but regardless, my backpack isn't big enough to carry my sleeping bag and any significant amount of stuff, so I decided to buy the smaller-than-giant suitcase that I've been wanting ever since I struggled to balance the weight of my stuff across my giant suitcase and my duffel bag. The duffel bag is a fine duffel bag, but it's bad for a number of heavy things, like books, which I don't want squished.

I checked out the suitcases at Jumbo, which sucked, and at Falabella, which were in the CH$45,000-116,000 (US$80-200) range. That seemed a little steep, so I went to the cheap-luggage place on Pedro Montt, the main drag through town. Perfect! A suitcase slightly bigger than carry-on, for CH$16,000. It had a small-tooth zipper, but surely it would last for this vacation and then the trip home.

When I lifted it up to see how bulky it was, one side of the handle broke.

I looked and decided it was easy enough to fix, so I had the lady grab another one, and I paid and went out.

Ten yards from the door, I put the suitcase down to roll it, opened the rolling-handle, and that broke. I went back to see the couple at the store.

"Hi, yeah, this just broke."

"What's going on? We've never had any problems with these."

"Well, two of them just broke on me."

With a hopeful look on her face, she moved to get me another one from storage.

"Um, no thanks. I'm done with these. Can I just have my money back?"

They were very nice about it. There's a saying here, "El barato cuesta mas": cheap stuff costs more.

I have a much more durable suitcase from Falabella for CH$43,000. More expensive, but it survived the trip home.

the shoehorn quest: conclusion

I'm still uploading photos to Flickr, but I have to share this one, because I could not make this shit up. This is where you buy a shoehorn in Santiago:


Yes, that's an orthopedics/medical supply shop. They sell back braces and foot orthotics and such. Apparently, also shoe repair. And shoe polish. I had a brief neurotic moment of wondering if I wanted to pay $2 for a shoehorn when I already have one I like better (albeit on the wrong continent), and then I thought, "Wow, you're an idiot. You need a shoehorn, and this is a symbol of triumph."

No joke. I passed by a galería and for some reason I thought, "This is the right block; that might be the one the guy was trying to point me to." I asked a guy at the nice clothing store--the first person in Santiago to know what a calzador is when I talk about it!--and he pointed me a few doors down.

Chris 1, Chile 0. Yeah, bitches!

In the States it's obvious to us: a place that sells shoes that need a shoehorn, will probably also sell shoehorns. New research project: do Chileans actually think, "I need a shoehorn. I'll go to the shoe repair shop that is also a medical supply store?" Or do they think "shoe repair store" and this just happens to be a weird one? (That's possible, one respondent did say I needed to go to a reparador, which would make it just curiously different rather than thoroughly bizarre.) Time for more research.

Today we did an Amazing Race, which is sort of like a scavenger hunt but with an emphasis on speed, and the things to gather weren't very hard, just awkward to get to. It was pretty epic: Jeremy and Sharon took several cabs, but even so they only beat me and Brandi by 3 minutes. We in turn took one cab, but arrived at the final Metro station at the same time as Corrie and Heather, giving us a neck-and-neck final sprint. They'd budgeted 3 hours for the whole thing, but I called them after 45 minutes to say we were on the final mission.

I'd wanted to go running this morning, but instead I spent an hour literally running across central Santiago. So now I'm going to bed.

on a quest

I own two pairs of shoes that benefit from a shoehorn: my Clarks, and my canvas running shoes.

In a fit of false economy in my last-minute packing, I decided not to bring my shoehorn. I thought, "Nah, I can get by without it." The stupid plastic shoehorn weighs less than my glasses. And my running shoes are actually really hard to put on without one. What the hell? This was not a smart decision.

Okay, so I need to buy a shoehorn. Now, I've never tried living day-to-day abroad outside Latin America, but one of many things Chile has in common with Mexico is that if you need something, you can safely assume that someone sells it, but that it won't be where you expect and it's like a scavenger hunt to figure out where it is. For example:

1. I'm in La Vega, the big market across the river (more about that later). I ask the guy who sells household sundries about a calzador. He looks at me like I'm from Mars, so I mime/explain a shoehorn. He says, "Oh! Yeah, a calzador. I don't have those."
2. Find a nice lady and ask if there's a shoe vendor.
3. Ask the shoe vendor. Nope, he doesn't have them.
4. Head south back into the Centro.
5. Stop at a shoe store and ask about a calzador. The guy looks at me like I'm from Mars, so I mime/explain a shoehorn. He says, "Oh! Yeah, a calzador. I don't have those. You need to go to a place that sells dress shoes." Right! Off I go.
6. Stop at a dress-shoe place and ask about a calzador. The guy looks at me like I'm from Mars, so I mime/explain a shoehorn. He says, "Oh! Yeah, a calzador. You have to go to a reparador, they sell them. There's one down on Paseo Ahumada, between Compañia and Huérfanos."
7. If there's anything like a reparador on that block, it's closed and has no outside sign.
   
8. Stop at a Hush Puppies store and ask about a calzador. The very friendly and helpful guy looks at me like I'm from Mars, so I point to the metal shoehorns in the glass case in front of him. "Oh! Yeah, a calzador." "Do you sell plastic ones?" "No, and these aren't for sale, they're for people to try stuff on. If you go to a regalería, they'll have them. There's one right around the corner, [garbled] La Igriega. They'll have them."
9. There is, needless to say, no La Igriega anything where I'm pretty sure he told me to go. I set aside the shoehorn quest, get my ice cream, and come home for a nap.
   

There you have it: at least an hour spent walking around a huge city, from store to store, trying to figure out who sells shoehorns in this culture. And apparently there's something wrong with how I pronounce "calzador" that I need to work on.

(UPDATE 3/28/10: By asking someone else today, I discovered the guy was saying "la galería", not "regalería". A galería is a rabbit's warren of shops in first or lower floors of a building, clustered roughly by type: shoe stores, photo stores, etc. This makes future success more likely.)

Nordstrom Rack

Last week I actually made it to Nordstrom Rack to buy clothes. I hate buying clothes. I bought two pairs of pants, and left them to be altered. They were supposed to be ready on Saturday the 27th.

I went in today, without the claim ticket, because I hadn't seen it recently and I figured "Hey, it has my name on it, I'll show them my ID, it'll be all good." My hidden assumption was that the pants would actually be there in the store, ready to go. They weren't.

The employees started looking, examining their stacks of tickets, looking at their logbook. I left my phone number and went home to find the claim ticket. Phone call #1 was a little garbled, but ended up like this:

"It appears the pants were altered, but one pair was put back on the floor, and the other magically disappeared. We have another pair of one of them in-store, and the other pair I can go pick up from our Westgate store and bring them here, and we can measure you on them and get those altered."
"Can I just get a refund and then figure it out?"
"Of course, just let me get to a register and I'll call you back."

Phone call #2:

"Hello, sir. Are you in the area? I need the receipt in order to do a refund."
"Um, okay. I'll come in later."
"Any time you'd like. In the meantime I'm going to check the [security] tape and try to figure out what happened to the pants."

Phone call #3:

"Hi sir, yes, your wife actually picked up the pants for you. She's the one who showed her ID and picked them up."
"That's interesting. I'm not married."
"Oh...you're not? It shows her on the tape picking up the pants."
"Uh...really, I'm not married. Can you describe the woman on the tape?"
"She's about five-foot-three, light blonde-brown hair..."
"Okay, I don't know who you gave my pants to, but I'm not married and my girlfriend is about five-foot-ten."
"Okay, thanks, I'll get back to you."

Phone call #4:

"Hi, this is the head of Customer Service. We can't figure this out, so we're just going to refund you for the pants."
"What happened?"
"A lady picked them up."
"Right, how did she do that without the claim check or an ID?"
"That's something I'll be looking into immediately."

Oooookay then. This is the East Palo Alto store, by the way. In their defense, they're very, very nice, and they were really helpful during the buying process. But you've been warned.

UPDATE (9:45 P.M.): The Customer Service woman called again, and the latest story is that they have the pants, already altered, and I can just come pick them up. They were "in the store" somewhere. My confidence is not increased, but we'll see how it goes.

the car, it does nothing

That's not strictly true. It does everything except start, but that is sort of a car's raison d'etre.

I left the dojo and stopped at the motorcycle dealership down the street to drool on motorcycles, and when I came out, the ignition wouldn't turn over. The battery's fine, all the electrical stuff works, no blown fuses, and even pressing the dead-switch in the clutch by hand, it wouldn't turn over. That indicates that either something related to the starter motor died catastrophically with no warning, or the dead-switch broke. I'd actually incline to the latter, but I won't know until Monday anyway.

Anna and I tried out Skype last night, and it worked really well, so I'll give that a shot for Chile. The video chat works extremely well (at least over American broadband), so I recommend it if you feel like, um, trying video chat. We'll see how well it works in a Chilean internet cafe, if at all.

Along those lines, tonight I bought an Asus Eee 1005HA netbook for the trip. I was all set to buy an HP Mini-110, but changed my mind capriciously when a friend pointed me to the Asus. I may return the Asus for the HP, or for the Eee with a matte screen instead of glossy (actually, I'm considering changing the order: I usually loathe glossy screens). Either way, I should have the thing set up in plenty of time for departure.