Word: bazaar
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Just a few miles down the road from where Shervington stopped to talk with the farmer is Kajaki Sofla, a bustling town on the banks of the Helmand River that is the local Taliban headquarters. It holds the region's largest bazaar, an essential stop for daily necessities like tea, oil and sugar. To get to the bazaar, travelers must pass through a Taliban checkpoint, where they are taxed and interrogated. Those suspected of collaborating with the British are beaten, or worse. Shervington can do nothing about it. All he can do is pace his area of operations like...
...matter how good the rug selection, the endless variations in style and quality make bazaar bargaining a daunting exercise. And any transaction can conjure old clichés of naive Americans and wily, opaque locals. But such clichés are exactly that. Rug traders drive a hard bargain for the same reason everyone else does: money. And anyone who thinks Western capitalism is transparent should look to the subprime-mortgage-derivatives mess. Still, there are some useful lessons I've learned from buying rugs, which, when taken with a healthy dose of skepticism for metaphor, are also perhaps a useful guide...
...There is no bazaar here," says another. Daily essentials, like cooking oil, sugar and tea are on the other side of the checkpoint. "If I go to the bazaar they will say I am an informant...
...Even in Syria, however, rug buying can be intimidating for the beginner. Innumerable variations of region, style and quality make establishing the value of any particular rug daunting. And then there's the relentless bazaar bargaining that can turn any transaction a microcosmic "clash of cultures" between in which straight-forward, naïve Westerners imagine themselves being conned by wily, opaque "Orientals...
...casual visitor, the streets of Khotan now seem back to normal. The bazaar is open every morning, selling everything from roast lamb and athletic shoes to handwoven local carpets and the famous local white jade. But the almost exclusively Chinese traders whose small shops line the streets between the large People's Liberation Army base and Unity Square are evasive when asked about relations between the races and the events of March 23, after which many of these shops stayed closed for days. One young woman from Sichuan province says it is getting dark outside and she must close...