Expo: wait in the queue to wait in the better queue. Only if I was getting paid to.

By the power of wandering flaneur magic we discover the exact fabric market Daniel wanted to see, Then spend the next 3 hours wandering around alleys in the part of old town where locals sell things to locals instead of to visitors.

Smallest girl child I have ever seen runs up to us, launches into kung fu pose with V for Victory fingers out and shouts HEL LO! and then runs of behind us, the deed done.

Old guy: "English American? English American, yes OK?"

"Yeah, meiguoren, American."

"English American?"

"Yeah, English, yingwen, dui."

"English American? English American?"

We both laugh. 

A pretty girl in a booth in a crowded fruit market is teasing a cat with a mouse on a string. I stop to watch. When the cat jumps she pulls the string away and  the cat falls. We both laugh.

In the meat market, we were the most out of place. Eels and prawns and bream were flopping in shallow styrofoam and plastic trays waiting to be skinned and sold, or sold by the fistfuls. Everything was kind of oil-slick. I bought two vegetable baozi that we ate. the girl I bought them from understood what I was asking for enough to get it right, but she couldnt stop laughing, or maybe she was embarrassed.

We met the German who's staying in our room and drank small beer with him most of the night. He described a bad mushroom trip in Amsterdam: "I don't know, we took them, and the man gave us a receipt which said, you know, try and do these things, and these things to avoid, andso, of course I lost it, yes, and so, we waited an hour, and took beer, yes? and think, these are no good, we are not tripping. and begins what you call it, seeing things which are not, and looking out the window, and stones are moving, and inside the lobby of the hotel, the wood is moving, and makes a sort of crown on my friend, and  the elevator has disappeared, so we must go out the emergency exit, and of course then, the alarms, and the owner comes and says "yes yes, i see what you have done, come the elevator is right here" and we go out, but we are in the red light district, yes? and so the prostitutes are coming to us and showing us what they will do and we say No no no and go back to our hotel room. And my friends is on the floor making the push-ups, yes? he is saying how disgusting blue the carpet is. And so it lasted four more hours than that."

We decided that if you can describe a psychedelic experience in a foreign language, then you are without doubt proficient in that language.