Again interrupting Dandong...an interesting thing happened tonight. I was coming home tonight after going to a Chinese music festival (post on that later!!), and I wanted to buy some fruit for breakfast because I have a Chinese girl staying me through couchsurfing. Well, it was kind of late so the street vendors had already packed up and I had no choice but to go into a little indoor fruit supermarket. I don't really like to go into this supermarket because I would rather give my money to the street vendors. I picked up 4 not particularly good-looking bananas, the guy weighed them and wrote a price on the calculator that was more than double what 4 bananas should be- 18 kuai. I was so tired and didn't really want to deal with it. I looked at the calculator and took a deep break rolled my eyes. I didn't even look at the guy. I was mad but I wanted to buy the fruit and didn't have anywhere else to go and was not in the mood for bargaining. My attitude towards bargaining for food normally is this- if you're going to try to rip me off, I'm not even going to bother buying from you, because 100% of the time there is someone else with in 10 feet of that vendor selling the same exact thing. If I can find someone who will give me the right price the first time, I am much more happy to give them my money. For me, bargaining for food is just a waste of time and I don't feel that good about it.
Anyhow, the guy must have noticed my reaction or felt bad because all of a sudden he cleared the calculator and wrote 8.5 kuai. I thought that he was showing it to me, but I couldn't believe that he would change the price like that, so I thought maybe he was showing it to someone else and I handed him two 10s. He gave me one 10 back and 1.5 kuai. I was astonished. I was going to pay this ridiculous amount and he still thought better of it. My faith is restored in humanity. lol. All in all, I think I have more examples of people doing right by me than wrong (even just earlier today in the market I didn't notice that I dropped my wallet and this person picked it up and gave it to me...this is the second time this has happened lol) but it can still be really frustrating when wrong things do happen- you know you are just being targeted because of the way you look.
BTW, I have no qualms about bargaining for clothes...those people will try to rip you off no matter who you are!
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