BUYING A MICROWAVE

November 23, 2003

Yesterday we bought a microwave. This was the result of one of those good news/bad news situations. The good news is, the work in the kitchen continues. The painter is almost finished, but in order for him to completely finish, the gas pipe leading upstairs had to be removed. Since we won’t need the gas line, no reason to have that ugly pipe on the wall. Now comes the bad news part…this means we won’t have a cook top for at least a week. The oven is electric, but the burners are gas. Rosella and her crew start work on the fireplace on Tuesday, and she said the entire kitchen should be finished by Dec 2nd. Until then, no gas.

I thought Art would go crazy yesterday without his morning coffee. Even though he drinks half decaf/half regular, he was a basket case. He even tried filling his coffee cup from the hot water faucet, then sitting the cup on the radiator!!! Desperation creates unusual situations! He finally decided to walk down to the post office and get a coffee (or two) along the way.

So yesterday we went shopping for a microwave. We knew that we would prefer one with a brushed metal finish like the rest of our appliances. Of course all the less expensive models come in white only. I would have settled for black, but we only saw one in black, and for whatever reason, we didn’t like it. Some of the models had doors that were hinged on the bottom, and these would not work for me at all. Since I am short, and since the microwave will be on top of the oven, it would be much too difficult for me to get stuff in and out, especially if it was heavy.

Another interesting feature that we saw on every microwave was a grilling feature. I’m not exactly sure what that is. Maybe it’s just the browning feature that we are starting to see in the U.S. Anyway, we looked at Gran Casa, and they had a microwave we liked, but it was white. We decided to look elsewhere first. We knew that MediaWorld had some microwaves with the brushed metal finish, but I couldn’t remember how expensive they were.

We decided to try our luck at Euronics in Ponte San Giovanni. We wanted to look in there anyway for a DVD player that would play zone 1 DVD’s without having to be hacked. Or without having to pay $400+ for a multi-zone player. Someone on the SlowTalk message board had told us about Euronics, and that it might be possible to find DVD players that would play zone 1 DVD’s even though they were listed as only playing zone 2. We also learned from SlowTalk that it was possible to hack a DVD player for a little as 20 euro, or possibly even download something from the internet.

Euronics was much like EuroSpin, with major appliances, small appliances, fans, vacuum cleaners, irons, and assorted kitchen ware, even fine china and crystal. We quickly found the microwaves, narrowed our selection down to two, asked a few questions, then settled on a Whirlpool with a brushed metal finish. Since our Whirlpool dryer had come with multi-lingual instructions that included English, and since I had seen the same format for the Whirlpool refrigerator we were buying, I figured this would be an added bonus. I knew that basic microwave directions were easy, but I was curious about that grill feature. Of course, once we got home and opened the box, the directions were in Italian only. So, I probably would never use that feature anyway, right?

We also checked with a salesman about the DVD players, and he said they had two that should play our zone 1 DVD’s from the US, but we should bring one in just to make sure. The best part was they were both under 100 euro! We plan to return next week and check those out.