Felt Marker

The only real item that Logan has requested while we are down here has been a nice chess set.  They sell them in most of the stores here and they are Incas vs Spaniards.  Logan had finally settled on one a week or so ago, and we negotiated a fair price and ended up buying it.  The way the chess sets work here is that the pieces are stored inside an Inca style painted box made of wood that doubles for the board.  When we paid, the lady placed all the pieces inside the board and taped it shut.

We had been quite busy over the last week or so and had not had a chance to have a game even though Logan  has been pestering me every ten minutes to play.  When we finally got around to playing, we tried to remove the tape, but along with the tape came the paint.  Uh Oh.

Ken was going to take us back to the store and explain to the shop keeper what the situation was yesterday, but he got busy, so he sent Ruddy over to help us out after explaining what had happened to him.  Ruddy is great, but he doesn't really speak English, so I knew it would be a fun time.  We got down to the store, and Ruddy explained the situation to the lady working at the time.

First Problem:
They record the items they sell in a ledger with the price it was sold at.  That is not a problem by itself, but the recorded value in the book was a few Bolivianos less than what we paid.  That's because we got the special Gringo price which is a little higher and presumably, the shop clerk at the time pocketed the extra.

Second Problem:
They didn't have any more of the same chess set.

Now the negotiating began.  Their first attempted solution was to pull out a black felt marker and try to draw the lines that had been removed by the tape back on.  Uh, no thanks.  They were unwilling to refund our money, so that left Logan looking for a different set within the same store.  He ended up happily choosing a smaller set with nice little pieces similar to the style of figures that used to come in Red Rose Tea when I was a kid.

The next issue was the difference between the price of the new set and the old one.  They wrapped up the new set and handed us 100 Bolivianos.  That made a net loss of 30 Bolivianos from what we had paid for the first one.  Ruddy was doing his best to understand us and to pass that along to them, when the same group  that were present to assist us with Logan's head wound showed up out of nowhere and helped us with the translation problem.  I eventually got sick of arguing and told Melody to take what they were offering because really we were spending 20 minutes arguing over 30 Bolivianos.  That's 4 dollars.  Four dollars is not enough for me to lose my temper over.  Four dollars and fifty cents might be, but four dollars is not.

Logan left happy with his new set (tape free this time) and we all cooled off a bit with a ice cold glass bottle of Coke.  Six ice cold bottles of Coke.....12 Bolivianos, or $1.60.   Getting all the souvenir shopping done....priceless.  I hate shopping.