Crisis! What crisis?!

When one thinks of crisis, words like "desperation", "need", "loss" and "necessity" come to mind.  I may have mentioned in one of my previous posts that it is hard to see the signs of this "crisis" here, lest the ghosts of semi constructed apartment buildings and ghostly cranes watching peacefully over them, as if to awake one day and complete the things once started.

So we went car shopping, to further test the laws of macro-economics during the "crisis" period.  We went to a few dealerships and the first signs were somewhat encouraging: the dealers were open on a Saturday: an excellent start.  But that is where the expectations of a car shopper should be kept to a minimum.  After an hour at a KIA dealer, we decided to visit Skoda dealer (made by VW).  One small Skoda dealership told us to drive to another and, since dealerships close at 1pm on Saturday! (and don't open on Sunday), they asked the other dealer to wait a few minutes.  We got there, to find quite an unhappy dealer: we were interfering with his plans of duing something else during this cricis of a recession vs selling a car.  In fact there were a few other people that came to the dealership 5 minutes later and he did't even want to let them in (he did let them in after they promised not to stay for more than 5 minutes).

After viewing the car, we arranged for a test drive for next Saturday at 10am at Skoda dealer and then at 11am at KIA (all this time we have a wonderful Spanish speaking friend helping us).  We get to Skoda to find that nobody is there at 10am.  The people show up at 10:15am, but they don't really want to talk to us.  Instead, they choose to talk to another couple who wanted to test drive a car.  After about 45 minutes, we decided that maybe the whole concept of crisis is just a figment of Western Society and not applicable to our locale, because there was certainly no desire to sell anything.  At one point I did ask about trying a different model, to which the dealer briefly (in broken English) replied "I do not recommend it" (not sure what that meant; maybe cars are just bad for your health, or something).

We were bewildered, puzzled, amazed, frustrated and determined not to ever come back to this dealership again.  So no Skoda for us (nothing against the cars, they are actually quite good).

So on we go looking for a car, hoping that just maybe there is a dealer around that is a little bit more worried about the current financial situation of this wonderful country. 

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