Shopping

On the way back from Agra, we decided to stop and do some shopping. I didn't really feel like buying anything so I took on the facilitator/translator role. We bought a suitcase, a short and relatively painless experience. The suitcase turned out to be a good shopping cart for the rest of the shopping. I found myself getting repeatedly frustrated when dealing with the shops. You'd ask for something in blue and a certain size, they would give you something red in a different size. You would ask again and get yellow in even another size. Somehow the concept of give the customer what they want seemed to elude every shopkeeper. We went from shop to shop, looking at clothes of all kinds, but the common theme remained the shopkeepers ability to give us everything except what we wanted.. Normally, I would've attributed it to language problems or the local culture, but I knew both of them well enough to get frustrated and annoyed. When they would finally get something in the right size, it would surprise them that we weren't going to buy it - it is the right size, what else do you want…

This experience continued with our driver. We would tell him to go a particular restaurant and he would take us to a different one of his choice. Once in a while, he would just stop the car and get out saying he's going to drink some tea so we should relax for a bit.