Teich.Net :: All In

I recently bought out the lease on my car.  I had a huge range of quotes, options and feedback, collected here for your benefit. Sorry, it’s long.

I picked up the car through Swapalease.com last year.  I assumed the lease with 13 months remaining – a perfect time for me.  In my perfect world, I’d get a new car every year.  As my lease came to and end (10/21/2009), I started looking around.  And found nothing else I wanted.  <digression> I need european cars here.  I’m a wagon guy.  I love the space and practicality.  Throw my bike in the back.  Or the dog.  Or the dog, and a weekend camping gear.  And still get 28+ MPG with awesome handling.  I don’t get SUVs.  Despite looking for months, I couldn’t find anything I liked better than my existing car – a 2007 BMW 328xiT manual transmission.  It’s red, which I hate, but otherwise is perfect.</digression>

If you’ll excuse me being gauche, I’ll talk turkey here and include prices.

My lease buyout was $32,000.  An insane number, set back when BMW thought residuals were in the 65% range.  Oops!  A quick search on BMWUSA.com came up with a number of similar cars, with more options, in better colors (i.e. anything but red) AND with the extended warranty for under my residual.  Moral of this part: DON’T just buy at the residual.  That’s for chumps these days.

First step, solicited feedback from car guys I know.  Seems that BMWFS (the leasing company) doesn’t negotiate with consumers.  Just doesn’t do it.  The dealers, on the other hand, can negotiate.  If they want to.  I’ve seen conflicting information, but it appears that when your car lease is up, the dealer has the choice to buy it if they want, or else BMWFS just takes it back and sells it at auction.  Some dealers will work with you, others are just lazy I guess.

I started calling dealers, trying to find out what kind of pricing I’d be looking at.  I’m willing to drive for a deal (I picked the car up in Seattle), so called a few: South Bay BMW in LA, Carrera Motors in Bend, OR (the originating dealer), Peter Pan in San Mateo, CA (closest to my house) and BMW San Francisco.  For each, I asked them to provide me with two quotes: one to just buy the car, and one for CPO.

Phillippe Kahn from South Bay was first.  He came recommended from a car friend.  I called him up at 9:15AM, explained my request and provided my VIN.  30 min later, he emailed me a quote.  No hassles.  Amazing service.  No BS.  Perfect experience.  Quote was for 27.5K, +1500 CPO.  Could do the straight buy out here, for CPO I need to drive down there.

Next up, BMW SF.  ”So, how much do you want to pay”.  Ummmm…. no.  Give me a quote.  ”That’s not the way BMW FS works.  I’m just here working on your behalf.  You give me a number, then I’ll go negotiate that for you with BMW FS”.  Ummmm… no.  Give me a quote. “I’m sorry, we can’t.” Look, another dealer already gave me a quote.  If you want my business, let me know what it’s going to cost with you. “Oh, OK, we’ll provide  a quote.”  That was a week ago.  No email.  No call back.  Nothing.  In case it’s not coming across strong enough, total complete slime balls.  Sleeze.  Ick.

Carrera was nice, but slow and confused.  I called up, spent 20 min explaining what I wanted.  The sales guy asked for my VIN twice, wanted to know who I had bought it from (explained I didn’t – twice).  I had heard that the originating dealer can get a better price, so after not hearing back after a day  I called back.  Provided my VIN again.  Explained that no, I didn’t know who the original person bought it from.  Finally, a few hours later heard back.  Received a quote only over the phone.  It was higher than South Bay BMW, by about $1K as I recall.  Didn’t write anything down since it was higher.

Peter Pan.  My wife bought a car from these guys a few years ago.  I liked our sales guy a lot – Hank – a great persian guy who reminds me of much of my wife’s family.  He’s a typical sales guy, but he’s been straightforward.  He wants to make money, but does it 100% honestly.  I dropped in to test drive a new car (hey, why not!).  After heading out for 25 min on my own in a brand new 535xiT (nice, but not 2X nice for me right now), I asked him for a buyout quote.  A day later he called me: $28K all-in, with CPO.  Do it fast, no work for him, and he gets to keep me as a great customer.  I instantly was sold.  Moral here: having a relationship with a sales guy is worth it.  And Hank is smart.  In two years (or one?!) when I’m moving on to my next car, you can damn well be sure that he’s my goto guy.

If you’re in LA area, or willing to drive down, Phillippe Kahn was also awesome.  Go see him.

Another fun wrinkle: BMWFS offers financing for used cars, but only if they are CPO.  They have a 2.9% APR on 48 months right now.  On a 20K loan, that 2.9% more than pays for the CPO cost.  It’s a net savings to pay more for the CPO and get the lower financing.

Hope this helps others thinking about buying out their lease.

While on vacation here in Boulder, I’ve been catching up on my lounging time. Lots of reading, playing games and in general full on bumminess.

After much practice, I must however conceed defeat. The cat has shown me the true power of sloth. He has been in this chair for 10 hours straight. He turns left, then right, but he does nit leave the chair.

Posted via email from Oren’s posterous

Part of my ride on montebello was through the open space preserve. This hill was a bit tough on my road bike- it’s steep enough that if I stood the back wheel just spun. I had to walk up the last bit.

Oren
 
Mobile – now with 50% more typos.

Posted via email from Oren’s posterous

Oren has been slaving away the last few days to get more than 1000 photos from our trip organized, geo-tagged, and generally cleaned up. He collapsed crossing the finish line, so I get the fun of telling you about them. A more manageable subset are now posted, twice!

Depending on your viewing preference, you can see our favorites on Smugmug (where our photos have traditionally lived) or view them on flickr, where you can partake in all the community goodness. You can also browse the extended set of all the decent or interesting shots on flickr.

We’re home safe and sound.  Look for photos from the trip in the next day or two, as well as some posts that really needed some photos to make any sense.

10 years ago I read Galen Rowell’s Mountain Light.  An amazing landscape photographer, Galen wrote a serious of books on both photography and the process and people behind it.  One section of Mountain Light in particular has stuck with me.   After he’s traveled and photographed a new area,  he’ll show the locals his work and almost always get the same response: “no, that’s not quite what it looks like”.  Flipping through his photos, when the nee plus ultra photo comes up, the idylic, beyond perfection photo, THAT’s the one that looks right!  Yes, he captured it correctly!

Barring philosophical discussion on the real world, it appears we all walk around with idealized models of our world.  Yes, that mountain is pretty, but these average photos aren’t the real mountain  It’s only when we see the most spectacular and perfect images possible to capture that they align with our mental model.  Galen constantly ran into this.  One of the best photographers of the late 20th century, and only occasionally could he capture something that came close the idealized picture we all carry around.

I’ve found this concept – that we carry around in our head only the best of the best, the real world not always living up – one that constantly pops up during travel.  It’s impossible for me NOT to compare each and everything I see, do, eat, experience with the best elsewhere.  Photographs are always a pale representation of the place itself.  Drivers honk 3x more in India vs. Vietnam.  Cambodian ruins are young compared with Egyptian temples.  This street market is tiny vs that one in Shanghai.  etc. 

It’s hard not to digress into some odd places – why do we take vacation?  What are we looking for that spending thousands of dollars in far flung places provides?  As a great photographer like Galen did, or a mediocre one such as myself attempts, I keep trying to see what’s in front of me, appreciate the light I’m seeing now, capture and lock away the best of the best for reflection and enjoyment later. 

My travel packing arrangements have fallen into a very regular pattern: wait until <12 hours before my flight, and throw random crumpled up items of clothing into a carry-on sized bag.  Push if necessary.  I survive, through I forget something and bring the wrong things 100% of the time.

This will come as no surprise to anyone, but Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam are hot.  “Africa Hot”.  And humid.  Basically, it’s my mom’s hell on earth.  (The ubiquity of cilantro here seals the deal.  I can officially think of no worse place on the planet for her.  We even had a thunderstorm here this morning!)  I have limited experience with nasty hot weather, having totally blotted all memory of summers growing up in New Jersey, so I needed to know how to minimize the temperature related humidity.  My usual packing methodology would not work here.  Instead, I spent a month reading, thinking and trying stuff out.

Perusing the internet, “loose cotton clothing” constantly comes up as the thing to wear.  “Boat pants”, those loose bag like things of cotton you tie on, are spoken of in reverence and revulsion, for their comfort and looks respectively.  Long pants are suggested by all out of respect: for the culture, and for the sun.  Armed with this knowledge, and the awareness that the stuff in my closet would bake me, I moved on to the next stage: Procurement.

As any good bureaucrat is well aware, the simple purchase of items is not procurement.  Proposals must be submitted.  Alternatives must be solicited.  Guarantees and contracts are required.  In my case, this boiled down to a simple, if stupidly time consuming process:

1. purchase EVERY SINGLE ARTICLE of “hot weather” clothing from BOTH the local REI stores, sierratradingpost.com and Patagonia.  Something like 40 articles of clothing in all.
2. Try on for obvious fit and duplication.  amazing when you buy from 4 places how many identical item you end up with.
3. Evaluate cloth for how it’s going to wear.  This is a made up process, in which I wore something, and stood around thinking about being hot. 
4. The important part – see what Olivia thinks.  It turns out, once I’ve settled on a piece of clothing being “good”, I seem to lose sight of anything that matters, like how it looks. 

After much good-hearted arguing about “imperialist styling”, and being mistaken at a glance for a good colonist, I settled on just a few articles:

• North face short sleeve shirt.  100% synthetic.  Crazy light.  It has a tight weave that blocks the sun, but is so light and airy that I hardly notice I’m wearing anything.  Favorite shirt.
• Patagonio Sol Patrol shirt.  Good long sleeve shirt.  Fits great.  Very cool in 35c weather.  Nylon blocks the sun, has a great color that can protect your neck.
• Exofficio Air Strip shirt.  Even lighter long sleeve shirt, but it fits a poorly, with sleeves that are too short and a big boxy body.  Was dirt cheap though, so what the heck.
• Exofficio lightweight zippy pants.  Never once zipped the legs off.  Insanely thin and lightweight, these are awesome.  Olivia tried to veto based on the fit, I ignored her and I’m glad I did.

I sprayed my long sleeve shirts with permathrin – a scary chemical that prevents buggies from getting you.  It’s been surprisingly bug free, so I have no idea if it’s effective, but for $7 for 3 articles of clothing, what the hell.

Besides the above, I brought a pair of travel slacks and khacki pants, plus 2 pairs of shorts and some underwear, a bathing suit and a lightweight fleece.  I threw into the bag 1 Abecrombie polo – my daily shirt back home.  It’s way too warm for any non-airconditioned space – I wore it one night in Bangkok, and have only worn it for plane since.  My 22” carry-on bag is less than half full of clothing.  We used the rest of the space for the odds and ends we’ve picked up along the way.

With this little clothing, I planned on doing a wash every few days.  The synthetic stuff is great – wash it at 7pm, and it’s usually dry the next morning.  Any cotton clothing takes at least 2 days in this humid weather to dry.  Heck, my kahkis are hanging up next to me right now still trying to dry after 3 days.

Final words – if you’re going to buy clothing, hunt around, especially with sierratradingpost.com.  Some of this stuff retails for $80/item or more, but can often be found on sale for $25.

Hoi An is a town of tailors. Their shops, lining every street, are filled with little women in flowing ao dai (the traditional dress over pantaloons that, aptly quipped, “covers everything, but hides nothing"), all ready to bat their lashes and convince you to order more than you intended. Every day, in shops all over town, the ao dai change colors: Sunday is pink, Monday white, Tuesday gray… Our tailor just shrugged when we asked the origin of the local tradition.

The choices for clothing here are overwhelming. There may well be a hundred or more tailors in and around town and every shop proudly displays the same styles in the same colors out front, none seeming to aspire higher than mid-tier catalog garb. How they all chose to make that particular apple green jacket with the hood and offset closure I do not know. A few of the popular "rack" styles are cute and very on trend. Others look like prom or bad bridesmaid dresses that would be more at home under fluorescent lights in a soulless department store basement. Looking only at the sidewalk showings, I wouldn’t have ordered a thing. Only the relative success stories of friends at home carried me inside.

There are three stores that advertise on billboards in the Danang airport and along the road leading into town: Yaly, Thu Thuy, and A-Dong Silk. The first two were most often recommended in our pre-trip research. A very stylish friend had told us about the shop Queen Margaret of Spain visited in 2002—if it’s good enough for an actual queen!—so we went first to Thu Thuy.

I had brought two items with me to guide the tailors: a favorite wrap shirt ruined in dry cleaning and my most flattering but now too big slacks. Thu Thuy had a fairly broad selection of fabrics and colors, with and without stretch, in patterns and solids. No perfect matches, but good choices. We had been warned that impostor fabrics are common and to ignore the labels on the fronts of the swatch books. The names stitched into the bolt edging seem to me more likely to be the real deal, but who knows. 

I went back for a fitting on day two. Shirt: perfect copy. Pants: needed some adjustment, but close enough to order another, more casual pair. And another color of my favorite casual dress. And shift dress I had started to fantasize about—just in case round one went well.

Next fitting the evening of day two. A few finished items, a few with earlier fixes missing, and one disaster. The shift dress was a mess, completely unwearable, nothing like the pictures I had given them. Broken lines, the omission of key seams, etc. made us think they were trying to copy without understanding design fundamentals.They had to summon the tailor in person to figure out what to do about it. (Usually customer interaction is managed by people other than the ones doing the sewing.) Some of what they had done was fixable. A big part of the dress had to be scrapped completely. They were good sports about it though, some frustrated looks, but no argument. I still left expecting to write off the finished product. They continued to suggest that I should order more clothes though. I conceded that if they managed to get the shift dress perfect the next day—fat chance!—I would get another.

Morning of our last day: completely redone dress! Huge improvements! Very close. Enough that between the excitement and the reminder of my offhand agreement, I was back in the swatches, ordering another in a very different fabric. That second dress missed some of the changes we had made to the first. Do they copy before they fix? In this case, different is not bad. I like both versions.

I didn’t negotiate the price at all. I don’t know whether you’re supposed to, but my salesgirl/fitter, Hai, knocked down the price for me a little on my second order. I picked the most expensive materials (which make up most of the cost), and my clothes ranged in price from $35 for the cotton wrap shirt to $150 for dress of Dolce & Gabbana wool with silk lining. Not cheap, but relative bargains for the quality and fit.

Meanwhile, to hedge our bets at Thu Thuy, Oren decided on day one to get a dress shirt made at Yaly. Their fabrics weren’t up to his usual standards, but were fully passable. (They had a drastically smaller selection of fabrics for women’s clothes; no stretch wools and only a handful of patterned wools other than pinstripes.) The fit was close on his second visit, very good on pickup. Using their most expensive cotton, his shirt came to $43 and turned out pretty well. At three times the price but with Borelli and Brioni fabrics, he still prefers his Hong Kong tailor (MyTailor.com).

We didn’t get anything made at A-Dong Silk, but the mid-twenties Australian couple we met on the flight in had things made at all three of these shops and said they liked A-Dong the best, though it was by far the most expensive.

Here’s what I learned from all of this. If I was to do it again, for any nice items, I would bring an example of what I wanted to copy, or at least a close pattern. Bringing magazine photos of what you want will do in a pinch, just don’t expect details like seam placement and finishing touches to come close. I don’t think they see a lot of designer apparel so they have trouble understanding or envisioning more advanced designs without seeing a concept applied. Being picky about fabric quality and usually having a particular look in mind, I would also bring my own fabric. The selection at Britex in San Francisco dwarfs all the shops in Hoi An combined. Even going in without these insights though, I’m so far happy with what I got, and the experience was mostly fun. Hopefully the satisfaction lasts.

You know how to cross the street, right?  You learned how years ago – look both ways, wait for no cars, only cross at crosswalks, walk quickly across, wait for green lights, etc. 

What happens when everyone ignores the lights, there are ALWAYS vehicles, and cross walks may only be there to make it easier to hit pedestrians?  In Hanoi at least, the simple answer – just do it.  No matter how crazy the traffic, everyone is driving quite slow here – max of maybe 25mph, and often slower.  Perhaps because the stakes aren’t as high (15mph moto vs 60mph car), pedestrian here have a different approach.  Wade on in. 

There do seem to be a few key rules to wading into traffic.  First, move slowly.  Second, look both ways all the time. Even on a one way street, cars and motos may choose to go the wrong way.  Third, move slowly.

On the busiest streets, with hundreds of motobikes wizzing by, it works like this: put a foot into the road.  Walk about 0.5-1mph across the street.  Stop mid pace if it gets totally crazy.  Let the traffic part around you.  Slowly keep walking to the other side.  DO NOT make any sudden movements, speed up, or jerk to a stop.  Smooth.  And voila, you’re on the other side.

Until we learned this, it was taking us a while to get across.  We’ve seen multiple other white folks stranded by the side of the road for minutes until we’ve walked across very slowly.  They immediately follow up and seem relieved to have made it.

It is easy to spend a lot on food in Hoi An. While many places there offer wonderful settings, Mango Rooms and Thi Nhan were by far our best—and most expensive—meals. 

Mango Rooms has gotten plenty of well-deserved accolades and guide book endorsements. It’s far from traditional food, which can be a welcome break on a long trip. And, it’s just plain tasty. The view from the bar on the second floor balcony doesn’t hurt either. The ever-so-light vegetable tempura—including squash blossoms!–and cocktails with fresh mango and passion fruit, ginger and lemongrass were the standouts. The fish of the day was also very good. The crystal rolls, forgettable. Chef Duc stars (and double stars) "favorites/sexy/yummy" (each page has a different footnote) that did end up being the best of our choices. If in doubt, go with those. Mango Mango, Duc’s other lounge restaurant across the river, facing the Japanese bridge, has a different menu but similar food. We ended up there on our last night when searching for the best vantage point to watch the full moon festival that had darkened the center of town. I was devastated when they didn’t have the tempura on the menu. They must had read my mind: we got two tempura squash blossoms as an amuse.

We biked to Thi Nhan (formerly the Quan Nhan restaurant described by New York Times food critic Amanda Hesser–it seems the former co-owner is now out of the picture) for lunch on the way to the beach our second day. We would not have found it without our hotel’s instructions to look for Full Moon across the street and the printout of the NY Times review tacked to the door. We were the only customers but didn’t mind. We had the choice between a $30 menu for two and a $50 menu, both five courses of fresh local seafood, the difference being "bigger crab." We went with the smaller portions, which we still couldn’t quite finish (though the crab was indeed tiny). The crab with the ginger-tamarind-lemongrass sauce, the shrimp with fried garlic, and the clams with I don’t know what (I usually don’t even like clams!) were outstanding, the fish and calamari also good if ordinary. Thankfully, Thi Nhan also shelled the crab for us at the table.

As for the rest of our meals: Hoi An Cargo Club was decent but not memorable aside from the particularly pungent fish. We tried the local specialties cau lau,, the white rose, and another noodle dish, as well as spicy eggplant, at Brother’s Cafe and found them all rather bland, but it’s possible that’s the style. We haven’t found much heat in the food in Vietnam, despite our best efforts. (Oren also got eaten alive by bugs at Brother’s, so we cut short our lingering there.) The beachfront restaurant we visited (the fifth one north of where the main road hits the beach, I believe) was passable, but nothing special.

Mango Rooms
111 Nguyen Thai Hoc
On the street that runs along the north side of the river, just east of the bridge that’s towards the center of town. Mango Mango is across the river, facing the Japanese bridge.

Ti Nhan
128 Cua Dai – Cam Chau
3 km from Hoi An, 1 km from Cua Dai beach, on the north side of the main road connecting the two, close to Full Moon (which is on the south side of the street)

Several other restaurants came up as recommended in our research. Of those, here are the ones we wish we had had a chance to try:

• Cua Dai Restaurant, at the Hoi An Beach Resort, recommended in the book of travel essays, To Asia With Love.
• Dung, 38 Phan Chu Trinh Street, towards the East end of the old part of town. We did walk by on our last night, but the neon lighting was not what we were looking for during the moon festival.
• The Mermaid (Nhu Y) Restaurant, where the spring rolls and white eggplant are recommended by Frommers. 02 Tran Phu St.
• The bun gio cha nam nhieu rau at an area up an alley off Phan Cho Trinh St. (about 100 yards west of Le Loi St.). Recommended by Duc of Mango Rooms, via a post on Chowhound. You have to go between 3:30 and 4 in the afternoon because that’s the only time the dish is available—we kept missing the window.