Asian Markets

When I am in Asia I often feel like everyone wants to show me how much English they know.
“Hello,” someone yells at me from the side of the road.
“Hello,” I respond.
“Xing xao ching choang di do chrah baiy.”
That’s about as far as I get with 98% of the people here.
Apart from wanting to use every English word they know, Asians want to extract every last dollar from you. In Asia, a lot of things are associated with America. For some people it’s relatives, others think of WWF wrestling, others think of the leading arms country of the world.
“You guys can bomb the shit out of anyone,” a man once said to me.
However, I think most people think of streets paved in gold and green on the trees, yes --pun intended. Because American’s are so famously wealthy, Asian’s have adopted a unique type of racism when it comes to prices. So while Asians are paying market price for a product, we have to beg and bargain to find the market price. For this purpose Asians have a secret formula for how much to charge you:
[Actual price * tourist dumbness level * (how many bags he/ she is currently holding+2) - 23] (converted to the local currency and adjusted for inflation) (1)
With a little math, this is a can be a great for figuring out how dumb you look. Once who have a ballpark idea of the actual price you can simply solve for your “Tourist Dumbness Level.”
I walked into the Bun Thang market in Ho Chi Minh with intent to do this. I found a fabric I liked that I knew market price had to be two dollars a meter. I was holding one water bottle which counts as a purchased item so we will count it as a bag.
“Thirty two dollars” she said.
I started to do the math, “Okay, so thirty two dollars plus twenty three that’s fifty five dollars minus two..wait… no that’s my water bottle plus two divided by twenty three?” I gave up with the math and decided that on the Tourist Dumbness Scale I have a TDS rating of, “Really Dumb.” Fortunately, I’m only dumb looking, and do pretty well at “The Price is Right.”
“I’ll give you 7 dollars.” I said.
“Deal!” She said without missing a beat. It’s one of those times I wonder if I should have gone lower, I mean how do you know? My attention is then drawn to the posted sign “silk $2.00/meter.” Oh, it’s all coming together now. That’s how I knew market price was $2.00 a meter.

(1) This is how Natural Selection insures that Asians are the best at math and not English.