Bazaar!

So - there is a wonderful Bazaar at Bagram each Friday. It closed down the day I arrived here and Hasn't been open since - until today. It was a very hot day, but so much fun to go out and do some bargaining. As we were walking out there Terrance asked if we were ready to "shop till you drop." We told him that was gay and he should not say anything like that again. (This is another part of military culture that is intersting - there is a lot of calling people gay - it is like an ultimate put down - yes most civilized people gave that kind of thing up by age 12 - but it is still alive and well out here. I think it has to do with having thousands of guys living together. Maturity levels rapidly drop in a bid to outdo the each other)



I love haggling prices. There is something about eastern cultures and haggling prices that is so much fun. I wish we did it more in America. The only hard part is knowing what a good price is and what is too much. The sellers My rule of thumb for today was to get the item for at least 50% of what they offer it for at first. I think that I still probably overpaid.



The have so many old artifacts from when the British and Russians tried to rule the country. A lot of old British Enfield Rifles as well as compasses, bayonets, sextants and telescopes. Most of them are genuine, but some of the compasses are clearly recently made. It looks like they made them brand new and rubbed the item in dirt or dipped it in tea to make it look patinaed.





They also have lots of Persian rugs. They are wool and silk made locally in Mazar-I-Sharif or Herat. This one is a silk rug. I have been speaking with one of our interpreters and he and I are going to come out one week so he can help me haggle the prices. This one is 6x10 and silk. I got him down to 175 but I didn't want to purchase it today in case I could get it for a lot less. I love the silk - it is hard to see, but these really have a nice shimmer to them.





There are also lots of gemstones. There are a lot of Emeralds, Tourmaline, Citrine, Peridot, Topaz, Rubies, and Sapphires mined in this region. I even got to see some blue diamonds, black diamonds and alexandrite.



It feels weird to sit out in the open air and look at gems. It is all so low-budget - old wooden table & cheap molded plastic stools - but then he will pull out a little high tech electric scale to weigh the stones when you want to purchase them.



The haggling is too much fun - it gets frustrating for some of the Americans that I work with. But I am used to it after living in Taiwan for a couple of years. In this culture storytelling is an art form. The more embellishment the better! So when i was looking at Emeralds, one guy was telling me how his brother single-handedly trudged up the mountain side in the Pansjir valley to find the emeralds and then walked miles and miles to bring them to him where he painstakingly cut them himself. All to demonstrate how rare and valuable the gems were.

Of course when you are on a military patrol and trying to get a straight story out of people it can get annoying. I once read about a local military patrol a couple of years back that came running up to some American soldiers in a panic about being over-run by Taliban. They claimed 400 Taliban were trying to overrun their police station. Of course being America, we probably scrambled 15 types of jets to look at the situation, only to have the soldiers show up and no enemy around. Most of the Taliban travel or attack in very small groups of just a couple people and the biggest they usually attack in is 20 or 30. Chances are that there were maybe 8-10 insurgents were attacking the post. So there you go - frustrating embellishment. I think it is kind of endearing - it is part of the culture and everyone does it and understands that it is not an actual number (except for us Americans). It is how they get to know each other. They are also a very hospitable culture - if you noticed the watermelon on the table up above - the shop owner totally tried to get me to have some - they will share all they have with you in order to be hospitable.