Our last full day in India. We didn’t have much of an itinerary, so today was meant to be pretty relaxing, mostly just finish up shopping. Waking up to say goodbye to Anjali, our trip organizer extraordinaire, we splintered off into small tuk-tuk sized groups to find some more Rajastani treasures.
We found Gopal Singh.
Gopal was a friendly, older, tuk-tuk driver that offered to take us around the city for a princely sum of 50rs per person for 1 hour. We managed to talk him down to 150 for 2 hours (roughly 3 dollars). He then took us to all his favorite (probably commissioned) places. It was pretty enjoyable for the most part and while I wouldn’t recommend cramming five Americans (well, one of us was German) into a tuk-tuk, we made it work. We spent a good amount of time at a fabric place that had markedly improved quality of products compared to yesterday’s market. While there Gopal explained his shopping philosophy “buy, buy, no buy, good-bye.” Sounded good to us!
His next recommendations were busts… a junky restaurant and an overpriced jewelry store. We declared victory and returned to the hotel. When Gopal dropped us off, he seemed a bit miffed that we only paid him double the negotiated fare, despite the pretty significant commission he likely earned from the fabric store and restaurant. Oh well.
Not interested in dealing with crazy cab drivers, we decided to have our final dinner at the hotel’s rooftop. It was a great dinner: we reflected on the trip’s highlights and applauded ourselves for being so great (like a small, slightly less glamorous version of the Oscars.) I’ll talk about that more later.
Tomorrow – the long trek back to the States!
Inspecting the merchandise
Sareena and Sam at dinner
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.