THE SILK MARKET AND STICKY RICE

This morning we left around 1030 and took a 45 minute bus ride to the Silk Market. This is a 6 story building with venders crowded into every inch of the space. They have......well......everything!!! There is so much going on that it is overwhelming. You don't know where to start. There are 3 walled booths packed full. The vendors try to get you to come and look at what they are selling.

"Lady, hello lady, come in and look, I give you deal. You need chopsicks? jewelry? painting? just take look". Then if you do see something you are interested in and you ask how much?? they say "how many you want? I give you better deal!" Then they get the calculator and show you an outragous price and say, "but for you I give you discount" and they give you a lower amount. You say no, no too much and they say, as they hand you the calculator, "how much you want to pay?" So, of course in return you give them an outragously low price. They look at you and say "Oh, no too low. Look at the quality, all hand painted! I make you better deal. How much you want to pay?" So you tell them the price again and then they come down a little and say "I gave you good price and you tell me this price, how about this much?" No, you tell them too much and start to walk away. They do everything they can to get you to buy from them. "How about this much? For you, you are good friend, I sell for this much." This can go on for 15 minutes or more. Finally they keep going down until you get if for somewhere between half of what they wanted and a little higher than you started with. CJ jumped in a few times in Chinese and they were shocked that he could speak Chinese but they also seemed to go down more when he did that. I think they know that he knows they will haggle.

There were so many nice things. I would love to bring everyone something back but it is hard and takes a lot of time. You really need more time to go around and look at everything and more money to buy all that you want and then another suitcase or two to bring everything home in. We did have fun buying a few things.





We took a little break from shopping and had lunch at a Subway next to the Silk Market. I realized this was the first time since I have been here that I didn't need to eat with chopsticks.

This is a picture of one of the strange things that I had no clue of what it was. CJ knew it was called sticky rice but never had it before. I bought some and all you do is boil it for 10 minutes. Inside is cooked rice with red bean paste in the middle. It was really good. We will have to have it again.
See, I really can use chopsticks!!!!