The Rug - Part II

NegotiationsNormally the price is $355, but because it was near their holiday it's 20% off... talked it over but decided it was still too high. Chai. After more deliberations, we said we would come back when our travels were over. The price suddenly dropped down to 220 because we reminded him of his sons. He went through a nice dialogue with Tim how he hadn't seen his son for many years, met him again, noticed the changes (while touching Tim's hair)... ya know, the usual stuff you talk about with your clientele. Another Chai, please. Alas, 220 was still outside our price range, and we prepared our backpacks to leave. He then sat us down, handed us the calculator and told us to input our price.

Hmmm... how low could we go? We both pondered this thought to ourselves... I think we put in 150 but he said its not possible. We put on our backpacks again to leave when the power suddenly went out. The light was shining through window that had a rug hanging from it... creating a beautiful sunlit image. Just like in the movies! This seemed to tickle Tim's pink and we sat back down again. I think we felt victory on the horizon. Chai. This time he handed us the calculator upside down so it looked like 091... flip it around - 160. Prompting him to say this was the lowest he could go. And just to make sure we believed him he told us something that other people in his religion might frown upon... "I swear to god, I married a christian woman." How can you not believe this guy. He even went over to his manager who gave a dirty look in our direction. While they were preparing the rugs and the paperwork we couldn't sit there empty handed and chai was, yet again, consumed. We got our carpets and wrote our names on the back with an wax pencil. Snagged a business card and promised to come back before we left India. +1 in the Win column, and maybe another half a point for all the chai we drank. Response: That is a pretty perfect rendition of what went on. The tuker stopped, and ushered us into this shop with all types of clothing in the first room, and we just kinda happened to get sucked into the side room with all these rugs, and people tossing them around left and right. We were quickly nabbed by Joe Magtegna and his understudy, and sat in a corner and got bombarded with questions about us and what we were looking for. Hahn's pupils immediately got huge, Requiem Dream style, as he wanted something nice for his apartment... cold winters in Japan equals cold floors in apartment... or some haiku i once read...anyway, the best part was watching Joe Magtegna order around his underling like the poor slave he was...yelling at him to "show us this carpet, then that carpet, no not that one you ass, that one over there...dont pick that up, they dont like that"...i could only imagine what Joe was really saying, but you could tell by the disdain on his face that he probably flogged the rug slave after we left...only worse was the chai slave, who just constantly got yelled at to bring us more chai...by the time we left i was floating in chai, and quite wired...two other things to note...when the power went out, we were sitting right underneath the only window in the room, and had our backs to it, which also had a translucent carpet over it. Looking into the center of the room, which probably had about 8 other people in it, we couldn't see a damn thing...I thought at that moment we should probably head towards the door before we get rolled and thrown in the gutter...luckily, everyone kept the clubs in their pocket and hahn and i walked out of there unscathed...other then my credit card...nothing like throwing around the plastic in a semi-shady store in a third world country...