Haggling Between Northern Vietnam and China. Differences and Strategies.

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The difference with buying things in China vs Buying this in vietnam is this; In China they will take advantage if they can, in Vietnam they believe they should take advantage of the foreignor.

Case in point, After a long day of riding we pull into a city. Exhausted we struggle our way to restaurant and being asking the prices, the merchant puts on a big front and snickers with his friends as he demands high prices. Sometimes he can be haggles down sometimes he doesn't care to be haggled down. On the rare occasion he tells his friends to fuck off and we get a fair price. Once they start chuckling with eachother we head straight for the door. In China haggling has always worked like this, Dwo Shou Chen? Big-Small-Money and then when you get the price Tai Gai La! (That's too expensive). They won't get you on the small things(beers or cokes) but they'll get you on the big items like your meat, or in one case I had to spend $20 for a "special" lettuce that I didn't ask the price for. Not all places would try to overcharge us, but 1 out of 4 would, and if we didn't pay attention our penalty would be steep.Now in Vietnam we deal with a similiar problem and we don't know how to negotiate really well. Here a loaf of bread is 5,000Dong for the locals but when we come up it changes to 10,000dong or 15,000dong. Sometimes I just stare, don't move and shake my head and sometimes they will knock a few bits off but will become angry if we want to local price. It is their belief that because we come from better off countries we should pay more. Instead of a few friends snickering at a higher price its a few people glaring and making sure we get a higher price. The way we do it now, is ask for the price of small items that we know, if its the normal price then they don't believe in the white-foriegnor tax. So we are safe there. Still frustrating when you come across several places in a row demanding western starbucks style prices.
Besides that Vietnam has been beautiful and amazing. Will post about that soon too.

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