PCV: Paid Caribbean Vacation

The strangest thing about India might be silk shops and how they are on every corner and every one of them offered a special price just for us. These silk emporiums were out of control. The usual routine was to parade all of us into a room of pillows and served us tea. Then they start with saris and scarves and usually finish with bed sets. The walls are covered in nicely folded silk and by the time they are finished there are things everywhere. They just unfold it all and 99% of it we don’t want so someone has to fold it back up. Me, being the extremely cheap person that I am, didn’t have any interest in their silk in the first place because I don’t know what nice cloth is, so I have no reason to start with the world’s finest. Don’t be disappointed, I wouldn’t have bought you anything anyway.
The first silk shop we ever went to was in Varanasi which is pretty much the capital of silk. We got taken there by our shady taxi driver who was trying to profit off our naivety. The first guy was not nice and would not show us all the tricks of the trade that luckily someone knew. Here is the class, listen up.
When going to a silk emporium, make sure they show you the quality of the silk not by looking at it or feeling it but by burning it. When you burn silk, it should burn like hair and smell like hair. It should leave nothing behind and no residue. Other fabrics will smell like plastic and leave residue behind. Just a quick little lesson incase you ever wind up in the middle of India and might be buying silk. Keep that in mind.
So the 2nd shop we went into was a little different and on the next morning. I felt like it was a set up on top of a set up because we went from silk dealer #1 who was a complete asshole to silk dealer #2 who treated us like kings and seemed to not lie to us at all where asshole #1 did nothing but lie to us the entire time. I didn’t buy anything there either. Don’t get your hopes up. The people that I was with spent close to $1,000 on tons of things but paid prices that I thought were a little steep even though apparently if you try to buy fake stuff in the US you cant get it for that cheap with intricate designs such as the ones they had, but I don’t know any better so I didn’t buy anything haha. Silk shops were strange because I was in them for so long and had nothing to do but look and laugh at my American friends get hustled by Indians who didn’t care about the quality of the cloth and knew that any price they demanded, these kids would agree to. My final analysis: silk shops are overrated. Go to a flea market instead. Then end.