The tourists apparently started haggling after being charged 1.50 dollars for a cup of tea :michael-laugh:
(NSFW in case some folks find mild violence upsetting)
Here’s the Nepalese woman’s side of the story
It was during monsoon season . A white women came to my tea shop with her son. I offered them tea in my cup. She said, “I prefer to drink in my own cup.” Which was three fold bigger than our normal size. Everything was good before she asked the price of tea. She said, 150 rupees was way too much for a cup of tea and insisted to decrease price but I tried to explain my hardship. She wasn’t listening to me at all. She threw money in-front of me using harsh words. Also, she took pictures of my tea shop and threatened to post it on medias and report local police.
I told not to do so saying this will not help my business in anyways and asked her to delete that photo. But, in return, she took her knife and pointed towards me. She was a devil, she was constantly irritating and triggering my anger and I couldn’t stop myself. [Pasang Gurung, Manang]
British women used her biased GoPro footage to ruin the hospitality image of Nepalese people, now it’s our turn to let the world know what really happened before that video was taken.
150 Nepalese Rupees is about $1.25 USD. For a huge cup of tea: served inside someone’s home and halfway up a mountain where supplies need to be moved via human power or pack animals through harsh roads to even get there. And the british tourist still had the gall to complain and threaten to ruin the owners livelihood over a drink that costs less than a third of what it would go for at a London Starbucks. Then she takes out a fucking knife.
There’s an unbelievable culture of chauvinism and entitlement among Anglos in Asia where they’ll demand everybody bend over backwards to accommodate them and expect to receive the the exact same favours as locals, despite the fact that they refuse to learn the local language and have many times more money sitting around in their bank account than the average family there will earn in a year.
Imagine traveling from your imperialist safe haven and trying to bargain some local down from a dollar and fifty cents after they put your ugly ass up in their home.
my favorite thing is that Canadian guy who went to an ayahuasca retreat and killed the elder who ran the ceremony (an 89 year old woman, lol) and then his family/govt got mad when the locals rightfully lynched and killed him in retaliation
Anglos legit think they’re gods
It fucking floors me every time I read stuff on travel that’s usually written by westerners (not necessarily anglos, though I am unfortunately one) on some poorer places, and people write about how to avoid scams and avoid overpaying, but then you run the conversion to the local currency and it’s like a fucking dollar at the most. Absolutely no skin off the traveler’s back, but can mean a good day’s wages for whoever’s involved. Fucking wild.
Even for condescending tourists they’re fucked up. Like, my dad once wrote a travel guide for Jamaica; he pretty consistently states that you should heavily tip all the people serving you, in US dollars if you can, because they’ll remember you for it. Condescending, sure, but pragmatic.
This a particular, awful kind of penny pinching posh person as well. No one would bat an eye at paying less than a quid for a cup of tea in Britain where no one has had to lug it up a mountain or give you free accommodation with it.
I guarantee this women regularly pays four or five times that for a weak teabag and a slice of lemon at home and probably double that again for a coffee made with laboratory equipment.
Holy fuck put this in my fucking veins :faded:
These people should be milking the everloving fuck out of western tourists, they’re the entire reason that their local economies have become completely reliant on tourism. Anyone who visits global south tourism areas and isn’t overwhelmingly happy to pay above the literal cents these people are almost always asking for, or even the overcharged prices, needs the wall
:stalin-gun-1::stalin-gun-2:
Literally how fucking undignifying must it be to watch most of your community’s local, culturally-important and historic professions disappear and be financially strong-armed into providing Service With A Smile to rich white people who treat you like a curiosity as though they’re at a fucking zoo or adventure park
Edit: The documentary Sherpa is about a bunch of Sherpas working on Everest coming together, after a few of them die from being forced through unsafe working conditions, to say a resounding Fuck You to the rich white owners of the tourism companies and to cancel the rest of the 2015 climbing season. It’s heartbreaking but I couldn’t recommend it highly enough. The praxis payoff and sheer magnitude of rich tourist cope at the end is just :chefs-kiss:
