Okay, so we knew the voltage was going to be different here before we left. I left a lot of appliances in storage because of it. I just didn't know exactly what that would mean.
So before I tell you about our electricity I have to tell you about Ooma. We bought this little Ooma box at Costco before we left. You connect it to your internet, and you can buy your home phone number for a small fee, and then for about $3.50 a month you can have a phone hookup. We did this before we left, so we could keep our San Diego home phone number.
So the people who are down here from the States all either use Vonage (sp?) or Skype to call each other. The Argentine landline will usually drop the call within about 10-20 seconds, so to talk to someone minutes away, we are connecting from across the world with our U.S. phone numbers - crazy!
Okay, back to electricity, so we brought our home phone along with Ooma in our suitcases, so we could have a phone as soon as we got here. The first day we were here, we went to the hardward store and bought adapters that look like this:
Because the plugs here look like this:
We researched our phone system and the research suggested our phones would work with multiple voltages. So we came home from the hardware store, plugged in the phone base and, #*#*##*#**#***. It burned out the entire phone system.
The next day we went to lunch at our sponsors home, and we told them about our experience, and as luck would have it, they had an extra phone they had purchased from Amazon and never used, and they let us buy it off of them!
When we got home, we plugged the phone into a transformer,
then plugged the transformer into the outlet, and it worked! Yeah!
Lesson learned, right?
The next day, I took a shower, then pulled out my handy, dandy travel hair dryer made to work from 110-250 Volts (it says it on the hair dryer itself). I plugged it in, it ran for two seconds, got as hot as Hades, then stopped completely.
I had never before thought about how much more electricity 240 Volts is than our American 110 Volts. Twice as much is A LOT more!
The sad part of the story is I couldn't blow dry my hair. For some of you, that may not be very sad, but if you saw me with no blow dryer, no flat iron, and no curling iron for my hair, you'd cry for me!
So for the next few days, including my first day to church, I had sad, sad, hair!
Eventually I made it to the store and way overpaid for a hair dryer that would work here - I say overpaid because everything is so expensive here!! I'll tell you about that in a future post - I'll tantalize you by telling you that inflation here is 25%. Can you believe that? Prices have gone up 25% in the last year!
If I'd have blown my hair dryer out (pun intended :) ) last year, I would have saved myself a boatload of money!
Until next time, Adios!
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