Markus’ Blog

Yum! And yes, that’s tours as in “more than one”.

It’s great times when upcoming vacations are getting close enough to book cool stuff to do. We are already practiced winery visitors (see the Napa adventure, the Victoria adventure, as well as the Niagara adventure). It’s still fun doing it, though (one might think we are big lushes :-D), especially in Canada and even more so in BC, where we can bring home as much wine as we please (not a measly two bottles per person you get to bring with you from the US).

This time around, my parents will come along, too. It’ll be their first time in the Okanagan, which prompted this whole trip-idea to begin with. Since my parents and I come from a wine growing region back in Austria (the region is officially know as the Weinviertel — and we have tons of Heurigen there), they should get some good times out of these tours.

We’ll be doing the Signature Wine Tour by Discover Okanagan Tours and the Nothern Bench Winery Tour by Wildflower Trails & Wine Tours.

Happy September 4 and 5 to us!

Everybody is writing about Rogers and their ridiculous iPhone plans these days. I will, too, but with the slight twist of comparing Roger’s plans to the plans available in Austria rather than the US.

The situation in Austria is different in the sense that the iPhone is offered by two cell phone providers: T-Mobile and One. That alone makes it more difficult for the individual provider to be as stupid as Rogers.

As of today, XE.com reports an exchange rate of $1.60 for €1, which makes things a little more expensive than they would have been even a month ago, compared to the Canadian Dollar.

T-Mobile:

Phone: €49 (8 GB), €99 (16 GB)
Contract duration: 24 months (changes to other iPhone plans allowed)
One-time activation fee: €49
Classic plan: €39/month: €0.25 per SMS, 1000 combined airtime minutes (mobile + landline in Austria)
Supreme plan: €55/month: 1000 SMS included, 1000 airtime minutes for each of the following categories T-Mobile, landline, other mobile carriers, voice mail (that’s 4000 minutes total)
Incoming calls: unlimited
Data plan: 3 GB of traffic included in the above
Data overage: €0.10/MB

One:

Phone: €149 (8 GB), €229 (16 GB)
Contract duration: 24 months (no changes allowed)
One-time activation fee: €0
Monthly fee: €10 for (Sep. ‘08 till Dec. ‘08), then €25
Airtime: 1000 minutes (all of Austria, cell and landline)
Incoming calls: unlimited
Data plan: €14/month for 100 SMS and 3 GB of traffic
Data overage: couldn’t find any information

Bottom line:

Not the greatest, but certainly more affordable than Rogers. From T-Mobile, you can purchase an iPhone for $158 ($79+$79), sign a 2-year contract and pay a monthly fee of $63, and that gives you more than Rogers: $199 for the phone and $115/month for the plan, locked in for 36 months. If you go over your bandwidth limit, it can still get expensive, but not as expensive as Rogers.

At the end of the day, I don’t think I’ll ever get the philosophy behind Roger’s iPhone plans. It’s the be sneaky, screw the customer over, take advantage of our monopoly, hope the customer runs past their bandwidth limit so we can charge even more approach. Customers are going to realize that (and they already have), and they’ll be rightfully pissed because of it. Rogers could have had a instead. Had they offered reasonable prices, they wouldn’t have been able to handle the stampede of eager customers, making good money in the process and not alienating their current and future clients. But no, they need to be stupid morons and try to make money the blunt (rub-it-in-our-face-we-are-the-monopoly) and sneaky (we-hope-you-exceed-your-bandwidth) way. I hope they get what they deserve, i. e. barely any iPhone sales. That’d be fun.

Would I, personally, be getting an iPhone if we had plans like the one offered by AT&T? Yes, absolutely. How about the T-Mobile or One plans from Austria? Maybe. Not sure. It’s on the verge, but still manageable enough that it could, realistically, be a yes. And with Roger’s plan? Hell, NO!

We are back from the East cost. Well, in fact we’ve been back for a few days now. Lucky for us, because they are suffocating in snow back there, yet again. I believe there were at least two days that Pearson Intl. had to be closed because of snow storms since we left alone!

For a summary of our less then stellar trip (even though it certainly had its good moments) and how things changed from the plans I outlined in my last entry, see my sweetie’s blog.

Like they said, it’s still cold here in the East. Yesterday it snowed quite a bit in Toronto, and today there were a few more snow showers. Although I have to say it did warm up a bit (it’s even supposed to get up to 2°C tomorrow).

This is how Queen’s Park looked yesterday:

Today we went on a wine tour in Niagara-on-the-Lake. It was great — and we bought lots of wine, as was to be expected. And we saw the Falls, of course. Got soked by cold mist in the process. Surprisingly many tourists were running around. We had not anticipated that. We were convinced nobody else would be crazy enough to go and see the Falls in the middle of winter. We were wrong. It made us feel much better about our sanity.

I found it amazing that quite a bit of the Niagara River was frozen solid. The ice was quite thick, too.

Now it’s almost time for us to pack up and head home. Yay for warmer weather! — Before we do that, though, we’ll be having Dim Sum on Spadina Avenue tomorrow morning, venturing onto the CN Tower (I am hoping the weather will be clear) and exploring Eaton Centre.

Baring nasty weather and the likes, we’ll be headed towards Toronto in just a couple of hours, departing 7am (a.k.a. stupid o’clock) from YVR.

Now, why would anybody be so crazy as to fly into Toronto in the middle of freaking winter? They are predicting highs of 9°C and lows of -11°C for tomorrow. We sure are getting our winter coats back out. ;)

So, back to the why. Well, it went somewhat like that:

1. This Event is taking place, which has quite a few awesome performers.
2. Brigette has never been to Toronto or Ontario before (I have, but that was in 2002).
3. We said: “What the heck, let’s do it!”

It should be good times. Concert on Thursday, some sight seeing and shopping on Friday (it’s supposed to be a warm 0°C), Niagara Falls, Niagara on the Lake and a couple of wineries on Saturday and, finally, some more sight seeing and shopping on Sunday, before it’s time to head back home again, where temperatures are decent this time of the year.

Let’s hope that the weather behaves during our short trip.

Hard to believe, but that’s how long it’s been since I came to Vancouver on February 11, 2003. Half a decade…sounds so long. It doesn’t feel like that, though. Not even a little bit. And that’s a good thing. That means I am enjoying my time and it hasn’t been boring at all, which makes it go by so fast.

I still like Vancouver as much today as I did back then, if not more. I have seen and done a lot of things here that I had never done before: from buying a car to having it stolen, from finding new friends to getting married, from learning to confidently speak English (as opposed to just reading it) to becoming quite fluent, and so much more.

I guess the five year anniversary would be a good point in time for me to get all the old blog posts from back in 2003 and 2004 back online. I’ve been meaning to do that for a while and even wrote a customized little Perl script to read my old phpBB database and import it into Wordpress. Now I just need to actually run the script. These old posts are all in German, though.

The bottom line is, I have not regretted coming here at all. I still think it was the right thing for me to try and do. And that, I guess, is the best thing of all.

I knew along with everybody else that there was some (indirect) price gouging going on in Canada with the US dollar losing more and more against the Canadian dollar. What I didn’t know is how bad it was in the consumer electronic market.

Take the new Canon Powershot G9 for instance, which I am considering getting myself (or have Santa get for me lol). My good old G1 is slowly coming to the end of its useful life. I like the G1, but there are so many more, nice features available now, seven years after the G1. One thing I will miss, however, will be the tilting LCD.

BestBuy in the US offers the G9 for US$499.99, BestBuy in Canada offers it for CA$599.99. Yep, thats $100 more in Canada, despite the fact that the Canadian dollar is worth more than the US dollar. According to XE.com, US$499.99 = CA$476.242 in today’s money. Granted, that’s a little unfair, because XE shows mid-market rates — better rates than anybody would ever get at a bank counter or through their credit card. So let’s assume US$499.99 = CA$489.99 if you did the exchange at the bank. And doesn’t $489.99 look like a perfect marketing price (seeming like a lot less than $500 while still being close)? Nope, apparently not. They want $600 instead.

Ain’t gonna happen, people. Not from me. I can get it shipped from the States and still save a bundle. And that’s without even looking at Amazon.com and other online stores, who will most likely be even cheaper.

I remember I did the same thing seven years ago, when I bought the G1. Except that I ordered it from Germany, where it was a lot cheaper than in Austria. — I guess, we’ve found yet another stunning similarity in how the relationship Canada vs. US mirrors the relationship Austria vs. Germany. There are quite a few that I have come to notice, but that’s material for another post.

Brigette’s mom came to visit this weekend, and since I had to return my US visa waiver stub (I-94W) by September 28, we decided to go down to Bellingham for the day and do some shopping. The fact that (after this decision had been made) the Canadian Dollar reached parity with the US Dollar, didn’t exactly deter our plans.

We expected quite a bit of a border lineup — and we got it. We decided to try out going to the duty free store on the Canadian side to see if that would shorten our wait. It probably did, but only by a bit. They had a system in place they called “ferry lineup” where you had to wait your turn like a regular ferry lineup. So, it took about an hour to leave the parking lot of the duty free store. They must have put that system in place to deter people from jumping the line too much.

We did buy quite a few things, though, at the duty free store, because they looked to be good deals: a bottle of vodka for Brigette and me for $27.25US. Brigette’s mom got some cigarettes and baileys. After crossing the border, we had a nice brunch at Denny’s and a good three and a half hour shop at Bellis Fair Mall. We got some really good deals on clothing and books.

Then, at 3:30pm, came the trip back home, with a very short lineup at the border. It took about half an hour to drive from Bellingham right to the custom’s booth (including a stop at the Starbucks drive through to get some coffee). So, really good. We made it before the crowd, which was the plan.

Since we figured it would be quite obvious that we had been shopping, we decided to declare our purchases. We were asked to park and go inside to pay duties and taxes. We weren’t very concerned. That changed very quickly, when we saw how the face of the custom’s officer got very somber. He said taxes on our “duty free” liquor/tobacco purchases would hurt. Since we hadn’t been out of Canada for at least 48 hours, we weren’t eligible for any personal exemptions. We still didn’t think very much of it at that point. We figured it’d be maybe $50 in taxes on a $110 purchase.

Very wrong!

Apparently the provincial government marks up alcohol purchased outside of Canada by at least 100%. Our $30 vodka bottle would have required a $70 duty payment. It somewhat works like this:

• they take the price of alcohol ($30)
• they add provincial a markup of another $30 or so
• then they add GST and PST on the combined amount

And that’s what you have to pay. Absolutely ridiculous. Brigette’s mom was asked to pay $170 in duties and taxes for her $110 purchase.

The Customs official was very nice, though, and totally didn’t want to charge us all that money. He let us go across the street to the duty free store to return our purchases (luckily we had bought everything on the Canadian side).

The duty free guys took our merchandise back without any issues. They’ve obviously had this happen to them before. They even apologized for not pointing out to us that we would have to be out of the country for at least two days to be eligible for the exemption. We had the sneaking suspicion, though, that they were doing it on purpose, because they know people would buy less otherwise and they wouldn’t make as much money.

In the end we didn’t have to pay any duty or tax. We returned our alcohol and tobacco purchases. And the Customs officials didn’t charge us tax on our books or clothes.

It was a good trip, all things considered. And a valuable lesson learned: provincial tobacco and alcohol markups are ridiculously insane. Don’t buy any alcohol unless you’re gone for 48 hours (or more) and if you do, do not go over the exemption limit.

It has been coming for a while, but it still surprised me to find it happening that soon. For the first time in 31 years, the Canadian Dollar was briefly worth more than the US Dollar!

The Canadian dollar rose as high as C$0.9996 to the U.S. dollar, or US$1.0004, according to Reuters data, before dipping back below the level. At 11 a.m. (1500 GMT), the currency was at C$1.0003 to the U.S. dollar, or 99.97 U.S. cents, up from C$1.0152 to the U.S. dollar, or 98.50 U.S. cents, at Wednesday’s close.

See Reuters for the full story.

The Canadian Dollar dropped slightly beneath the US Dollar again. But exchange rates always go up and down, up and down. The trend for the Canadian Dollar has definitely been to gain on the US Dollar for a while. So, I am guessing that we’ll see the Canadian Dollar rise again and probably stay above the US Dollar for a while.

Quite a few, it would seem. I was aware that there were at least one, probably several towns and cities called Vienna in the United States. What I did not know was how many there actually are and that there’s even one in Canada.

So, let’s see:

• Vienna, capital and a federal state of Austria
• Vienna, Ontario
• Vienna, Georgia
• Vienna, Illinois
• Vienna, Louisiana
• Vienna, Maine
• Vienna, Maryland
• Vienna, Missouri
• Vienna, New York
• Vienna, South Dakota
• Vienna, Virginia
• Vienna, West Virginia
• Vienna, Wisconsin
• New Vienna, Iowa
• New Vienna, Ohio
• Vienna Township, Genesee County, Michigan
• Vienna Township, Minnesota
• Vienna Township, Montmorency County, Michigan

Pretty impressive list. I had no idea.