Bargaining

I was sitting on a tiny plastic stool on a busy corner of Dam market, just off the main drag in the coastal city of Nha Trang. As the stall’s owner moved to hand me another plate of food, I waved my hands. “Oh, no, thank you; very full,” I said, patting my stomach.

We had just polished off four rounds of what I can only describe as squid omelet: A couple hunks of nautical head-piece and tentacles chopped up and fried on a hot griddle. A thin mixture of egg and bean sprout join the picture, twirling on the searing black metal for thirty seconds before two quick flips and the tiny omelet lands next to its twin on a plastic plate.

This is served with a small garden of greens – lettuces and mints and basils and cilantros, as well as a fiery chili-garlic dipping sauce. Delicious, cheap, very alien street food.

We moved to pay, asking “How much?”

She points to both of us, “Foty Touszand Vietnamdong.”

A dollar each for four squid omelets, a steal in any country. We reach into our wallets. Zane pulls out a twenty K note, and she takes his half of the bill with a smile, two hands outstretched. I fumble through my wallet, a collection of huge, 500,000 notes and nearly worthless, pulpy 1 and 2 thousands. I find a ten, and hand it over, ready to count up a bunch of twos and make up the difference.

“Its fine,” she smiles, holds up the total 30,000 dong, and goes back to tending her sizzling squid.

In that singular nonchalant instant, she revealed to us that we had, for lack of any other term, been had. Willingly. “She just admitted to having us,” I vocalized with incredulity.

Bargaining has become the defining facet of my day-to-day life. To feel like you aren’t getting ripped off at every turn you need to engage in a seriously long back and forth to reach a deal that can even be considered legitimate. And even then, you know the locals are getting it at half the price.

In Vietnam, the going wisdom among tourists is that the first price a local quotes a foreigner is generally about 5 times the going rate. With that figure in mind and a (very necessary) smile on my face – after all, the whole back and forth is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of humor – I can pretty reliably get what I think is a fair price.

The thing is, when it comes to food, it’s an entirely different story. Generally there is no upmarking the price when it comes to street stalls. I don’t know if it’s because the motherly pot-stirrers have some inner desire to see everyone well fed, but the plastic stool on the sidewalk is, above all things, fair. You wait your turn; everyone gets the same thing and the price is an acknowledged standard. It’s comforting to know that in a country with such a rich tradition of food, as long as I don’t develop a new penchant for buying lacquered antiques on the street, I should be OK money-wise.

But for now this maker of delicious seafood omelets has thrown all of that in doubt.