Chinese Carryout in a Houston Super 8 Motel

Today I am participating
in a self imposed social experiment by spending eight hours in the Houston airport. As I said earlier I am at the whim of the air-mile gods whose infinite wisdom decreed that I had to fly here last night and wait ‘til 6 this evening to continue on my expedition to visit the Smiths in Oaxaca. I could have taken a bus or something into the city – but I decided to skip that expense and just tough it out.

Traveling alone is rarely a pleasant experience. Little things become more complicated. Say you’re just sitting minding your own business typing away on your laptop in the Continental lounge (which you have successfully talked your way into – no doubt with the help of your snazzy new hat) and you need to use the facilities. Well there is nobody to look after your stuff – you must shut down and re-pack your backpack and shlep your gear along with you. As much as I would like to trust my fellow man – losing all my junk isn’t worth the hazard. Even so these little episodes of minor annoyance do help punctuate your time. When tossed into an unfamiliar situation our psyches will take what they can to get through the passing of time. For example – it only takes a day or two of incarceration until one’s whole world revolves around mealtime – one’s self perception can be reduced to that of a snorting Boston terrier dancing on kitchen tiles with very little effort – Wonder Bread and Kraft cheese slices – mmmmmm.

Another batch of pastimes I am guilty of is eavesdropping, reading over folk’s shoulders and coming up with life stories for people based on their wardrobe and items that are carrying.

There are two major types of conversations that one may overhear when on the road. First you have you communications by people traveling together. These are usually short transmissions of info and questions about destinations, boarding pass checks – a tall shaggy haired 30 something in a shirt with a pattern that shouldn’t have survived 1968 and his skinny black clad straight raven haired female companion get up to head to their gate – he asks her if she still has her driver’s license. I think, no bozo, she tossed it into the trash when she came into the lounge.

But these are the kinds of things that go through a person’s mind when on the road. One checks their pockets to be sure their wallet is still there, looks at their passport, checks their boarding pass for departure times over and over and over again – I like to call this syndrome (actually I just made it up right now) Travelers Tourettes. You’ve seen it – you’ve done it – looked inside your purse or backpack for an item you know is there and then check for it again a half an hour later or sooner.

The second type of conversation I have noticed is the rehearsed story. This is the pat mini autobiography shared with complete strangers. These can veer in a couple directions – you’ve got your one-up-manship usually between a couple “marketing” types.

Okay – a little aside here - when did salespeople become marketers? Is it an image thing? Who do you think you’re fooling - you’re peddlers – you’re adding no value to your product you’re simply selling the goods – are you ashamed of this fact? Let me know.

So one can overhear these “marketers” bragging about where they’ve been, what they’ve done, who they met and all the while the guy that is being spoken to (and it usually is a couple males participating in this metaphorical head butting) does his best to cut down the achievement of the first. “Oh, you were selling data systems to the Buddhist monks in Bangkok and they taught you how to kick box? Well of course you’ve not really seen Thailand ‘til you get out of the city.”

Well, I see I am getting to the end of the page here and I’ve managed to kill a little time. Guess I should go out and dig up something to eat on the concourse.

Next installment (hopefully) – arrival in Oaxaca.

Will you sell me one of those if I shave my head?

Okay,
you wouldn’t go to Target and argue over the price of a feather duster with the cashier would you?

But, this is how a whole lot of commerce takes place across the globe. There are no set prices and bargaining is a way of life. I have overheard many tourists complaining in the far flung places I have visited, “Why can’t they just list the price, I hate all this haggling.” These people don’t know what they are missing.

I love it. I enjoy the whole process the first extremely insane low ball offer countering the merchant’s opening extortionary price. The back and forth – examining the item for a smudge or loose thread and showing the flaws to the seller who dismissively waves his hand saying that it, “is nothing” or better yet, the imperfections show that the piece was truly hand made by his own convalescing wife and thus, elicits higher value! The walking out of the store and the merchant calling after you to “come back we can talk some more…” Chances are whatever you are bargaining for you will see the exact same item somewhere else – so if you do walk out and are not called back you know you’ve gone below what will be accepted. You can hope to find the item later – or there is no shame in swallowing your pride, smiling and coming back into the shop with a higher offer, just be sure they are really letting you walk.

This past trip to Egypt I developed a new line that was good for knocking a third off whatever price was currently being batted about. Oh yeah, another important part of successful bargaining is to smile, keep the humor going, if you look like you’re having fun the prices will undoubtedly get better. Anyway, my new never fail line was to look the seller in the eyes, smiling, throw my hands into the air while appearing as comically shocked as I could muster and ask “Why do you hate me so very much?”

This invariably caught the merchant off guard and he would laugh, pleading that “No, no, no – I don’t hate you, I am giving you a good price” Then he would lower his “good” price even more. Another trick I picked up this time was no matter how low you got the price down to, right before you shook hands – okay, this is important too, once you’ve shaken hands the deal is done – both parties are bound by their word and negotiation must stop - so this other trick, right before you shake hands on the lowest price you’ve been able to bargain you pull yours back a bit and say “Plus, you give me a gift.”

This will result in the shopkeeper wailing something along the lines of, “You are ripping my heart out!” but more often than not they will throw in some other little trinket from their shop to seal the deal.

Now, let’s say you have negotiated this great price on a fertility icon for your mother in law, if you have change coming do not hand over your money until you have seen it. You would be amazed how nobody ever has change – so ask to see the change before finishing the transaction. A shopkeeper may feign insult, just tell them you know that he is honest but one of the merchants down the road had cheated you like this, so now you are just being overcautious – chances are good that he will agree with you that the other seller is a crook and it is good you have come to this shop. Nevertheless, it makes good sense to scope out the change first.

So, can this M.O. be used stateside? Certainly.

The second day back home from our trip to Egypt our water heater crapped out. The igniter which lit the natural gas to warm the water burned out. We called a local plumbing repair service and they came out. I had already diagnosed the problem through an error code on the electronic panel of the unit and the technician verified my finding. Unfortunately he did not have the part to fix it right then and would have to order it. For this work he quoted me a price of $450.00 and some change. After he left, I looked the part up online – getting three different prices – none of them over 95 bucks. I printed these out and waited the two days for our repairman to come back.

Our guy comes back and I ask him how much the new part costs. It is a good idea to have a little bit of inside info when going into a negotiation – like knowing what price a previous seller let me walk out of a shop in Cairo – the fact that I had three different prices on the new igniter put me ahead in this deal.

He tells me that his company paid 160 dollars for the part. I reply that they are being ripped off and show him the three quotes I have. He blusters a bit about overhead and shipping blah blah blah – but right out of the gate I had him. I tell him I want an itemized bill now – because to my reading, he is about to charge me $350.00 in labor for a twenty minute job. He offers to drop the price by ten percent – I counter with how about double the real cost of the part, $200.00.

He wasn’t ready for that – I doubt that anyone had ever lowballed him to this extent before. We went back and forth awhile, he calling his boss three times, and we finally settled on 275.00 for the job. Once that was sealed with a handshake I paid him the 275 and then I tipped him an extra twenty bucks – the “gift” thing works both ways. Plus I figured it would smooth over any ego issues that might impinge on the correct installation of the igniter.

Now would I have had the gumption to bargain over the price of a hot water heater repair bill without the experience of shopping in the markets of Bali, Bahrain, Istanbul or Luxor? Who knows, probably not. Even so I challenge you to go out and strike a bargain today.

Oh the weather outside is...

View out the window from the Continental lounge

So my parents are stuck in a snowdrift on the freeway with our stupid little foo foo dog - hoping for a tow truck they called to eventually show.

They bravely drove Sara and me to the airport as we start our trip to Istanbul. Or - more relative to our current situation as we cool our heels at the airport which was just closed 20 minutes ago. We were told that there would be no updates for two hours so we stare into the white out sitting in the Continental lounge hoping to somehow get onto a flight that takes us away from this Blizzard of the Decade.

Instant update! My mom just called, a couple of hippie burn out type kids pushed them out of their snowy snare! Cigarettes dangling from their mouths long greasy hair - I imagine they probably had Metallica T-shirts on. Hooray for heavy metal samaritans! I can see them shouting to my dad "Drive safe old dude man!" flashing the forefinger and pinky horns as he fishtails away, Suzi thankfully barking at them as the rear wiper flings ice in their wake. This eases my guilt a bit.

Folks around me are beginning to introduce themselves to strangers sitting by them - where ya from - where ya headed? That bonding that occurs in any crisis or inescapable situation. Those fleeting microcosms of relationships, rolling through our pre packaged introductory stories, rehearsed with every new aquaintance.

Holy moley - a plane just pulled past the window and the Las Vegas flight is boarding! Got to get those gamblers on their way! Okay - cross your fingers, I have promised to bring a belly dancing librarian from Parma some finger bells back from Turkey. Maybe we will get out of here today.

Stay tuned....

Ice 9 - Michael 0

I snapped this shot of my car in the school parking lot after school.

Today was not a snow day. Even thought the weather was 20 times worse than it was last week – the school district I am working in this week has already used its allotted snow days so they had a 2 hour delay.

I drove down an ice covered route 271, crossing lanes over humps of snow and solidified sludge – what would usually be an hour and 15 minute trip took 2 hours. Not insanely longer – but white-knuckle all the way. That feeling when your stomach detaches from your esophagus and intestines then just starts bouncing around like the dot in the old video arcade game Breakout.

The kids hung in there today though – even though we had truncated periods because of the delay. More on them later.

I hope it's warm where you are – no matter the weather outside.

the only thing you could cook on here would be a chilly dog

No business like snow business

Snow Day!

The equivalent of winning the lottery for a 6th grader. Today I was supposed to start a three day residency in a middle school outside of Oberlin Ohio but at 6am I got a call from a teacher at that school informing me that there was no school today because of snow.

Now we do winter pretty well up here on the north coast of the United States of America. Cleveland has plenty of snow plows and rust bucket cowboys to careen them about at breakneck speeds throwing blinding salt laced slushies across windshields of automobiles they pass and knocking down the mailbox in front of parent's house on a regular basis. An approaching snow plow will send whole cadres of grade school bus stop denizens running shriek squealing away from the roadside to avoid being covered with an icy batter of dirty frozen street sludge. And plow drivers never stopped their trucks to get out and give chase when pelted with snowballs – they are the one safe moving target that can be besieged with impunity - nonchalantly shaking off the icy missiles like a buffalo quivering its shoulder to send a fly on its way.

Usually the snow doesn't slow the populous here in town. Well, it might slow down things a bit but there is none of the crippling insanity that happens in places like Washington D.C. and further south where an inch of snow shuts the world down and is the impetus for stampeding in the Chinese made and most likely flammable electric blanket aisle at Wal-Mart. (Okay, I misspelled Wal-Mart as wallmart and MS word spell check caught it and corrected it with the trademarked spelling – that's a little creepy.) Anyway, snow generally doesn't stop us here. Chicago, Detroit, Green bay, Cleveland, Buffalo etc. etc. we can handle this.

Now the snow has stopped out there and it is a winter wonderland – the fluffy white stuff hasn't been tossed around wheel wells and drug around until it is all dirty and the colors of toe jam. Perfect for sledding or any other wintery fun time activities – none of which I care to partake in. Really, they could have had school today – it was worse yesterday when they did have school. But see, up here there are snow days built into the calendar – so just as often as not, snow days are called kind of as an afterthought – a reward for the inconveniences suffered the day before. But hey, I'm not one to complain. I got to stay in my warm bed a bit later today.

Hard to believe that just a little over a week ago I was walking around in 90 degree heat and humidity in a rice paddy on Bali. Well, another week and Sara and I are off to teach and speak at a conference in Istanbul – I don't think they get any snow days there.