Bank Transfers and Personal Cheques

A few days ago we found a cute apartment to rent in Florence and emailed the owner to inquire about it. She was super nice and wrote us back saying that it's available.....oh but it's 50 euros more than advertised......and there is a 30 euro charge for cleaning....and she only accepts bank transfers for the deposit.

HA! What's a bank transfer?

So we head down to RBC and give them all the information she had given us to transfer the money and find out:
1. It was going to cost us $45 to do a bank transfer and
2. She didn't give us her home address, which we needed to do the transfer.

But we found out we could do this transfer thing online and it would only cost $13 so we decided go to through with it. She emails us her home address and says she doesn't understand why we are having troubles because "she does bank transfers all the time from all over the world....". Uh huh.

We went online to do the transfer and found out that the address she gave us for her bank isn't coming up. Hey - this is RBC - not some tiny credit union - I kinda trust the source.

We email her again and ask her to confirm which bank to use from the list we are getting. She suggests that we send her a personal cheque instead.

Well I suggest that she get her ass on PayPal. Does she want our money or not?!

In the meantime we paid the deposit on the apartment in Rome in 2 minutes over PayPal and all we needed was an email address.

So we decided to look for another apartment and found one. We've booked it and paid the deposit (with PayPal) and I can't handle them already. Click on this screen grab - do it.

Now I just feel bad because I have to write the first woman and tell her that we won't be coming after all. I know she will rent her apartment out - it's super cute and in a perfect location. I just hate stuff like this.

But on the positive side, this is where we will be staying for 7 nights in Florence.