Along the streets of Vientiane's Boat Racing Festival are little stall selling food, clothing, and junk no one needs, as well as these little "carnival" stands. I put quotation marks around "carnival" because we're not really sure they know what a carnival is.
Nick speculated that the people who set up the carnival stands saw the fairs in American films and tried to imitate them, but didn't really understand how the whole carnival stand system worked.
This is how the whole thing went down:
I wanted Nick to win me a stuffed animal at one of the carnival stands. Specifically, I wanted him to win me an "Asian-y looking" stuffed animal. (Prizes varied from juices to Hello Kitty crap to Asian-y stuffed animals... lots of pink and baby blue.) So he walked up and asked this teenaged girl who was working the stand how much it was to play the dart game. Through Seth and my interpreting (we're learning numbers in our Lao classes), we figured out that it was 2,000kip ($.25) for three darts. We then asked how much it would be to win the biggest animal. We couldn't understand her response to this answer... it sounded like she said "30,000 kip" ($5), but we thought we heard incorrectly.
Anyway, Nick threw the darts (and got 3 of 3).
When we excitedly asked how many more darts he had to throw to get the big blue stuffed thing, the girl again said 30,000kip.
At which point we figured that they were charging people to throw darts, and simultaneously selling stuffed animals at the same stall.
So Nick won me a stuffed animal! (By throwing three darts and paying 30,000kip).
And then even more awesomely he carried it around for me all afternoon.
We're not sure who the stuffed animal character is... we just call him Mr. Ripoff.
He's stuffed with styrofoam peanuts.
No comments:
Post a Comment