I drove a motorbike for the first time today, what an experience. Turns out my experience riding bikes, driving cars, and using a throttle on a boat all made it for a pretty seamless and intuitive experience.
My hostel is too loud because of road noise, so I’m moving to a new place.
Reflecting more on my bracelet transaction yesterday, I am doing some more formalized introspection. Putting myself in the shoes of the sellers, I feel that the kids “scored” and had easy money. I sense that this might possibly increase their greed; what I know is that after the transactions I felt a bit disempowered. The older woman, again I don’t know for a fact if she was telling me the truth or anything. Of course I am going to help feed her with my purchase, but I think her appeal to my emotion by motioning that she needs to eat could have been manipulative, but it’s naturally a sales tactic. The kids were playing a game, a fun one and challenging one, and they learned (or at least reinforced) that it’s possible to fool people into paying more than something is worth, considering they literally gave me two more bracelets just as consolation and out of generosity once I paid (which is definitely a good sign at least!). I think it’s actually my duty to hold sellers accountable to fair market price, so that greed and profiteering is kept in control. I know I had good intentions with buying the bracelets, but there are many more subtle things that happened there that I’m exploring now by writing about this.
As soon as I overpaid for the first bracelets, the floodgates opened and the older woman with less sight basically rushed toward me, strongly motivated to GET something from me (that’s my interpretation, and what I sensed from her). From there even more kids came by, kinda to the table to get a piece of the pie.