And.... done
It’s 1:30 am …. 6 1/2 hours before my flight home… 3 before I have to wake up again. I spent today shopping… yes, shopping… mostly Christmas presents and souvenirs… i’m getting good at bargaining… or “Chinese Womaning”... It helps to know what prices should be… If I had known 5 weeks ago, I’d be a bit richer…
But I’m done… not a bad last day in Bangkok… I would’ve preferred to have shopped more yesterday and just relaxed today, but I really don’t have any complaints… except I found a new area of town that has tons of cheap stuff… the same stuff I bought… but cheaper… grrr….
That said…shopping here is a fun and amusing experience… ... Thai people are really bad actors… and even worse liars…for example, when I’m looking at something, say, a coin purse, the lady will say…”hand make, thai seewk, I gib you good price!” then as you look at the billions and billions of them in the basket, she says “ok, original 250… but I gib you 230… 20 baht discount!”... then I say something like… “no… too much… I can buy 4 for 240 from lady over there”... (note, I reduce my English vocabulary and accent to better communicate with the locals… extra words just confuse them….) ...this is where the acting really begins… “Can Not! I job no more! Please help ME!” at which point I start walking away…. then she starts yelling down the street after me… “Ok, best price, 200!” .... “Sir… 180!”... If it’s something I’m interested in and the initial quote wasn’t entirely off base, then I’ll come back and bargain some more… Interestingly enough though the 20 baht, that was a huge discount before now becomes a tiny bit of money that I should pay out. If the price is stuck between say 80 and 100, she’ll say something like …”Come on, you cheap… 20 baht only little money… You tourist can make easy… for thai people big money… “
The best is when someone finally understands that you know the going price… like when I walk up to a place selling t-shirts, and ask how much… they say something absurd like 280 baht (8 bucks)... I then look at them with a really concerned look… as if to say… “you’re really going to try to pull that?” I then fire back with something really close to their cost… plus a little bit… “no, too much…150 baht… 250 baht for 2”... then they look at me… sees that I know, nods… then we can do business….
anyhow…it’s now 1:45, and I still gotta pack… so… that’s all from this side of the planet…
As The Locals
I went to the weekend market today… or the JJ Market as the locals say… it’s nuts! I hear it’s like 14000 vendors/stalls all in one area… it was packed… and hot… so i spent a lot of it drinking back fruit smoothies… i figured i should be a little healthier than I had been… prices at this market were better than the night bazaar and Phuket/Krabi as well… though I really wasn’t in the mood for shopping… but when am I ever?
I also met up with my friend Dan againtonight. His wife Art was in some sort of Thai variety show down at the university so I went down and watched it… It was rather fun… reminded me of some productions back at SCBC... I didn’t understand much in this one… that includes the English songs… though it was entertaining and there are some incredible voices here…
Afterwards we went out for dinner… well second dinner… we at tons…12 dishes… 14 of us…and paid 2400 baht (80 CAD)... Man I love this country!