Day 19

Today everyone was packing, Except for 3 of us. Some were heading home by various routes, others were heading to Cambodia for a couple of days. We were staying the extra day to clean up the accounts etc.

After the goodbyes were said and the buses headed off to the airport we decided that we should pick up some gifts before heading home. So we brought Ap Jacob with us and hailed a taxi. Describing the taxi driver, who thinks he understands English but doesn't really, where "that place" is can be a challenge. You know "that place" where there's shops, but close by there's some old buildings, and also close to "that place" is a small monkey temple. What does the driver get out of that description? Monkey temple. I'm not sure the religion it is but they have these temples in Kathmandu that are filled with Monkeys and there's a big one that all the tourists go to on a hill on the outskirts of town. Of course this isn't the one my father in law was describing, he wants the one by "that place" So after 15 mins heading to the wrong place we finally convince the taxi driver to take us to where all the shops are. Which he eventually does in a round about way to extend the cab fare that ends when he got stopped by the police for driving up a vary narrow one way street…the wrong way.

If you haven't experienced buying goods in countries outside of N America then you're probably going to get ripped off. That's where Ap Jacob comes in. We negotiate a price in English then he rips into them in their language and we save another 30%. After getting a bad deal on our own on some baseball hats, Jacob tells me the trick to negotiate. If they ask 1000 rupees, you laugh at them and offer them less than half, say 400. Then they'll come to 750 and you work out a price that normally is around half the asking price and you only get that after you've almost walked out of their shop 3 times. Its quite an interesting system.

Even though we left the first shopping location and headed to a second one we did see some very old buildings and temples but none of them had monkeys. We still don't know the real name of "that place"…..