Day 19 - Finally Learning the Ropes

I am quite certain that sheep are the most annoying creatures on the face of the Earth.  Why anyone ever decided that they wanted to domesticate these animals and bring them to live on their land is beyond me.  I do finally understand how we began slaughtering and eating animals though.  It had nothing to do with hunger.  Today was another pretty slow day.  Chatondra and I got up early (well, early in my mind) to go downtown and check out the shops there, since she still needed a gift for her brother.  There are a lot of cute booths down there, although I think a lot of it was geared towards tourists.  There are a bunch of rather pushy men who wander around looking for foreigners so that they can insist on either taking them to their shop, or ‘showing them around’ which actually means leading them directly to the shops with the most expensive goods, and trying to help the stores make a profit off of the ‘wealthy Americans.’  It actually worked out pretty well though, because we decided to cave to one of the guides and let him show us around, so we got a good feel for the market and found out where everything we wanted was while our guide kept unwanted company at bay.  When we got tired of following him, we claimed that we were hungry and going to get lunch (we actually did stop for a quick ice cream break) and then doubled back really quick to the spots where we had seen something we wanted to buy.  I also finally cracked the secret to haggling with the vendors.  Most of us have been struggling with that, I think because we are clearly Americans, and the shop keepers know that we aren’t used to having to barter for what we want.  It turns out, if you say what you are willing to pay, and then simply turn and leave when the vendor refuses to lower his price even a little bit, he will come running after you and agree to the price you had offered.  If only I had figured this out three weeks ago…