OT: Sens Lounge XCVII: "Zorf; 21 times!" Edition

[YouGotAStuGoing]

What could I do/say to get my friend to stop bending over backwards for his irresponsible younger (but still adult) brother?

Seems to fall squarely in the domain of "not your place, your problem or your responsibility."

 

[Engineer]

I will be doing my first introductory flight next week, I'm really excited I have wanted to be a pilot my whole life and this is step one

 

[trentmccleary]

Definitely. I remember getting pretty awesome wine for like a Euro in Spain.

Haven’t been to Italy really. Feel like that’s one of my major food bucket list destinations (along with New Orleans and Mexico City).

IMO, Mexico City is more like your New York where there's many things to do in a week. Food and wine was great in Buenos Aires. Though, I may have skewed this by going with a higher budget in BA.

 

[branch]

I will be doing my first introductory flight next week, I'm really excited I have wanted to be a pilot my whole life and this is step one

How are you affording the 60,000$?

 

[Engineer]

How are you affording the 60,000$?

The cost estimate at the flying club I will be using is around $15k for PPL.

I will want to add some ratings after the fact (night, instrument, floats), and that will add to the total as well.

But I shouldn't have any trouble with the costs with my salary.

 

[branch]

The cost estimate at the flying club I will be using is around $15k for PPL.

I will want to add some ratings after the fact (night, instrument, floats), and that will add to the total as well.

But I shouldn't have any trouble with the costs with my salary.

Ahhh sorry I assumed you were talking about going full commercial/multi engine/instrument etc which easily runs 60,000$-70,000$ here in town.

 

[Engineer]

Ahhh sorry I assumed you were talking about going full commercial/multi engine/instrument etc which easily runs 60,000$-70,000$ here in town.

Nope, just my privates!

 

[Mingus Dew]

IMO, Mexico City is more like your New York where there's many things to do in a week. Food and wine was great in Buenos Aires. Though, I may have skewed this by going with a higher budget in BA.

Yeah budget is key. I’m at a point in my life now where I can more or less take 2-3 vacations a year and not worry too much about cost (nothing obscene, but I don’t sweat expensive dinners or nights out).

Would love to see Argentina. Also dying to go to Peru (Inca Trail yes please).

 

[saskriders]

There is a company that offers a bus tour that starts in Alaska and ends in Rio after going through all of Central America and most of South America that I would like to go on some day.


Also, does anyone have any experience barbecuing beef back ribs? I picked some up from Costco the other day and was thinking of cooking them for my Dad's birthday. I remember at a hostel in Vietnam having really amazing Argentine style pork ribs, and would like to do something similar if possible.

 

[Ray Kinsella]

I’ve been out of power for the last 2 hours or so. Can someone enlighten me and tell me the map says I’m not really out of power...?

 

[DrEasy]

Yeah budget is key. I’m at a point in my life now where I can more or less take 2-3 vacations a year and not worry too much about cost (nothing obscene, but I don’t sweat expensive dinners or nights out).

Would love to see Argentina. Also dying to go to Peru (Inca Trail yes please).

I had some of the best food in my life in Argentina. The parilladas (meat BBQ, including the steak of course), the pizzas (which may sound strange, but there's a huge Italian immigration), the wine... There's the alfajor, a sort of cookie with dulce de leche in the middle, yum! At the Havanna chain that makes alfajores, you can have a latte with crumbled alfajores in them, it's the most decadent thing!

The only problem with Argentina in my opinion is that it felt too much like I was in Europe, just maybe not exotic enough for me. So if you go that far, it's worth crossing over to Chile and take a day trip in Valparaiso.

 

[Mingus Dew]

I had some of the best food in my life in Argentina. The parilladas (meat BBQ, including the steak of course), the pizzas (which may sound strange, but there's a huge Italian immigration), the wine... There's the alfajor, a sort of cookie with dulce de leche in the middle, yum! At the Havanna chain that makes alfajores, you can have a latte with crumbled alfajores in them, it's the most decadent thing!

The only problem with Argentina in my opinion is that it felt too much like I was in Europe, just maybe not exotic enough for me. So if you go that far, it's worth crossing over to Chile and take a day trip in Valparaiso.

I mean, I have a week of vacation left in 2018. Maybe a South American adventure is in order!

 

[maclean]

Masi Campfiorin is a solid choice. My wife likes the sweeter whites and likes Black Tower or Blue Nun (lucky for me as it is not expensive!)

Blue Nun has a strangely special place in my heart because my parents had a Blue Nun box they'd used for moving books that I'd always been fascinated by. If your wife's a fan I imagine I don't have to explain that "blau"(blue) is a colloquial term for "drunk" in German. Always found that kind of funny.

 

[Mingus Dew]

Blue Nun has a strangely special place in my heart because my parents had a Blue Nun box they'd used for moving books that I'd always been fascinated by. If your wife's a fan I imagine I don't have to explain that "blau"(blue) is a colloquial term for "drunk" in German. Always found that kind of funny.

I’ve only ever moved books in wine boxes lol. It’s such a perfect method.

 

[BonkTastic]

How about beer?

Well, Canadian beer is definitely better than a lot of the euro-trash beer out there. Obvious exceptions are the northern mainland countries - Belgium and Germany, who do beer better than anyone. French beer is good-not-great, and the further south you go, the worse it gets - Swiss beer is like 20 years behind the rest of the world, Italian beer is bad, Spanish beer is worse.

Sour beers are quite trendy in places in Sweden. A lot of them are super good, too... just not the kind of beer you can drink all night.

Did you used to think it was good? I mean, I don't remember ever even paying much attention to the Ontario wine section of the LCBO, I didn't have to go to Europe to realise that the foreign wines were better and cheaper to boot. That said, I have had a couple of Henry of Pelham reds I thought were quite decent.

I used to think that it wasn't as bad as it is. I never thought VQA was great, but I didn't realize just how bad it was until I left North America.

California wines are better than the large majority of the European stuff imo.

California wines can be good, but they have their fair share of garbage wine. I mean... California produces almost as much wine as France. There's a TON of bad mixed with the good. I'd say there's as much bad California wine as there is bad French wine, if not more. The good stuff is great, but the bad stuff is undrinkable.

The issue here is that you probably have better access to good California wines than you do good European ones, due largely to shipping costs and ease of transport within North America.

The problem is that the selection of European wine at the LCBO is pathetic and way too expensive

Preach! I've seen JP Chenet at the LCBO for like $12/bottle... that stuff is the rotgut of French wines. It's the Old Milwaukee of French wines. It's the Michelob Ultra of French wines. It's the stuff you can find on sale all the time at Carrefour for like €1.80 per bottle. The fact that they would import that crap into Canada at the LCBO and charge 4-5x the price is criminal.

But when you're in France, Italy or Portugal you can get fantastic local wine at the market for 6-7 euros a bottle

You can get great local wine in France for under €5/bottle. You can get fantastic stuff in the €15-20 range too, but the local cheap stuff can be great as well. I bought a bottle of chateau-neuf-du-pape in Avignon for like €6, and it was as good as any French wine I've ever had.

 

[BonkTastic]

On a personal note - anecdotally, I can proclaim CIBC as the worst bank in Canada.

They just lost me as a customer for life, and I'll be sure if anyone ever asks for my recommendation on banks, that they are not only last on my list every time, but I will do everything in my power to convince any friend or family to never give them a single penny's worth of business.

 

[YouGotAStuGoing]

Also, does anyone have any experience barbecuing beef back ribs?

No experience, good luck, but just wanted to chime in to say beef ribs are a criminally underrated food.

Sour beers are quite trendy in places in Sweden. A lot of them are super good, too... just not the kind of beer you can drink all night.

I don't know if it's just that I'm not looking hard enough, but I wish sours were more prevalent here. I don't think I've had one in months and that was just by coincidence that the bar had any.

On a personal note - anecdotally, I can proclaim CIBC as the worst bank in Canada.

They just lost me as a customer for life, and I'll be sure if anyone ever asks for my recommendation on banks, that they are not only last on my list every time, but I will do everything in my power to convince any friend or family to never give them a single penny's worth of business.

Any details you can get into? Interested in how they f***ed up this badly.

 

[BonkTastic]

Any details you can get into? Interested in how they ****ed up this badly.

Story isn't too complicated - we bought a house, got a mortgage with them, and they pulled the mortgage out from us 2 days before closing (we close on the house TOMORROW) not because we no longer qualified, but through sheer negligence and incompetence on their part - they forgot to follow up with the underwriters, and the mortgage was refused because the bank hadn't provided the correct details.

We are fine, luckily because we are anal about over-preparing for these things and we had prior approval from a mortgage broker who stepped in with the financing we needed (which was actually very small - we're buying a house well within our means and we have a huge downpayment). It was 100% the bank literally not processing the mortgage until it was too late, and then submitting the wrong documents even.

Can you imagine that? We got official approval from the bank almost two months ago. TWO MONTHS. And they wait until two days before closing to tell us they were cancelling the mortgage, and on top of that it's entirely due to their own incompetence? The Broker we ended up going with was ready to give us TWICE the amount we needed, and basically said she'd never seen such a clusterf**k of epic proportions on a simple, small mortgage before.

If we weren't in as good a shape financially as we are, this would have 100% screwed us. If this had happened to a first time home buyer with a minimum deposit and a less-than-perfect credit history, this would have ruined them - they would have lost the house, lost thousands of dollars on the deposit we paid, lawyer's fees, and possibly would have been faced with a lawsuit from the house seller.

And on top of all of this, nobody at CIBC even had the balls to apologize to us. I actually think they realized how ridiculously they F-ed up, and figured they knew an apology wasn't going to fix the issue, so they didn't even bother with it.

We pulled every penny we had with CIBC yesterday and are now with another bank for everything. When we told the new bank about what happened, the manager was almost in tears over how badly it could have turned out.

 

[YouGotAStuGoing]

SNIP

Uh... the word' oof' comes to mind. Good grief. Total negligence. Glad it didn't hamstring you too much. The lack of apology is what gets to me. Like yeah, they messed up pretty badly... but basic human decency, you know? An apology should never be about fixing the situation as much as it should be genuine remorse for an action – or in this case, a lack thereof.

Thanks for sharing. Certainly won't be changing over from RBC any time soon. And, amid the shitstorm... congrats on closing!

 

[BonkTastic]

Uh... the word' oof' comes to mind. Good grief. Total negligence. Glad it didn't hamstring you too much. The lack of apology is what gets to me. Like yeah, they messed up pretty badly... but basic human decency, you know? An apology should never be about fixing the situation as much as it should be genuine remorse for an action – or in this case, a lack thereof.

Thanks for sharing. Certainly won't be changing over from RBC any time soon. And, amid the ****storm... congrats on closing!

Thanks man!

Happy with the house, and happy with the new bank. I'm just glad that my story had a happy ending!

 

[Mingus Dew]

Thanks man!

Happy with the house, and happy with the new bank. I'm just glad that my story had a happy ending!

Good that you ended up OK after all that.

For what it’s worth if you had suffered monetary damages as a result of this you 100% could have sued CIBC.

 

[BonkTastic]

For what it’s worth if you had suffered monetary damages as a result of this you 100% could have sued CIBC.

Oh yeah, I was fully prepared to lawyer up if it got to that point.

 

[Burrowsaurus]

Oh yeah, I was fully prepared to lawyer up if it got to that point.

sue anyway

 

[maclean]

Ugh, that sounds horrible. Glad you made it out unscathed and let that be a lesson to everyone about being overprepared for everything! Personally I think pretty much all banks are pretty horrible most of the time, but definitely wouldn't want to be associated with one that f***ed things up that bad anymore. You'd think besides an apology they'd be bending over backwards to make that situation right, and it's hard to believe the bank doesn't have the resources and contacts to do so

 

[PeterSidorkiewicz]

I only bank with my credit union. They're fantastic.