Shopping In India

Shopping in India was a trip in itself! No one would give us a firm price, of course, so all our time was spent drinking chai and trying to agree on a price for whatever little goodie we were trying to acquire. Most prices started at least twice as high as what would be considered even ballpark. The first couple of weeks, this pastime was kind of fun, but after a while it just plain got stupid. Instead of telling us a price, the vendor would pretend to figure out the very best price and show it to us on his calculator. I never figured out why he would do that, so I finally pretended I couldn't see it and he would have to tell me out loud how much he'd come up with.

One of the most interesting vendors we saw we didn't snap a photo of -- it just seemed too invasive for some reason. He was an ancient old man sitting on the road surrounded by a sundry assortment of empty bottles he'd found -- a liter of Smirnoff, a ketsup bottle...He had a plastic bucket with a honeycomb in it, and was filling these found bottles with honey and selling it. No, I didn't buy any, if you were wondering.

We went into a ginger factory. There was a large courtyard completely full of drying ginger. Inside an unlit, windowless room were two women standing next to a shoulder-high mountain of ginger, shaking a screen box full of the stuff; the air was full of tiny pieces of flying ginger, which made our photos come out with strange star-like spots on them. Of course they asked for money after we snapped photos, which we were happy to give them.

In Delhi we stayed in Pahar Ganj, a wholesale neighborhood where people from all over India come to sell their wares to reps from the tourist shops. They had rock bottom prices, but of course I'd already fallen for the silk sari in a totally tourist ripoff store, and had bought plenty of scarves. I fell in love with a bangle bracelet but was required to buy 12 due to it being wholesale. We went to another wholesale district, Sadar, where yarns and threads were sold to weavers; that was quite a learning experience, as there was no real wool, cashmere, linen or silk yarn to be found anywhere, even with an escort from one yarn shop taking us through the labyrinth of dead end alleys full of other yarn and thread wholesalers. We were educated by a vendor who said all the silk products (scarves, shawls, etc) in India were actually made from "authentic imitation silk." It is a viscose rayon, spun into a fine yarn and woven by hand (mostly) into these sumptuous items. It is a beautiful fabric, and the yarns hold dye marvelously, but, alas, it is not silk. Too bad we learned about this on our last day!