Sure enough, we pulled up to a men’s clothing store which was run by men from India or Pakistan. (Apparently, no matter what country you go to in Southeast Asia the tailors are invariably from the Indian sub-continent.)We all milled around for a few minutes looking at racks of wool suits that we had absolutely no interested in buying while I tried to figure out what our best play was here. Obviously, we should at least pretend we’re somewhat interested for a few minutes.
I looped back around to the front of the store and saw a rack of light-weight, short-sleeve cotton shirts that I had somehow missed on the way in. “Hey Austin,” I called to my twenty-year old nephew. “You know what you need?”
I have found that when traveling abroad, multiple occasions will arise that will give you a choice to either get yourself all worked up or to just flow with it. I have learned that it usually best to make lemons out of lemonade.
Five minutes later, all three of us –my nephew, my brother-in-law, and myself- were cracking each other up as we tried on matching shirts. While our wives and daughters wanted to die of embarrassment, we strutted in front of the mirror convincing ourselves that these US$16 shirts were the hottest things since Nehru jackets.
We tried to get the shop proprietor to meet us halfway on the price, but he wouldn’t budge.
You know what, let’s just pay the man the $16. Consider it the cost of our escape. At least it’s a whole lot cheaper than buying a custom-made suit.
I’m guessing this shop doesn’t sell very many suits, but I bet they sure sell a lot of those $16 shirts from the rack that's right there by the door.
And –unlike The Wisconsin Dells- at least they didn’t ring a bell every time they made a sale.
And off we went in our tuk-tuks to the Standing Buddha temple -all three of us sporting our matching shirts.
Three days later, I saw the exact same shirt in a night market for US$5.00.
Ah, but it didn’t come with a three-hour tuk-tuk tour.
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