It is an absolute shopping haven here in Nepal and it is so much fun shopping is rupees, but only if you know where and how. We were firstly introduced to the supposed best shopping district called Thamel, the central city of Kathmandu city. Just like the Melbourne CBD, this small city is packed with foreigners, relatively expensive hotels and food, and over priced merchandise. Foreign to the country and with sufficient amounts of spending money (during the first few days), we had wrongly thought Thamel was the place to shop and ended up purchasing goods for double the usual retail price. Only until now we realise the smaller towns located a few streets away from us sell the best and cheapest equivalent goods as those of the bigger districts. Smarter shoppers we are now.

Shopping is hardly an experience unless you bargain, and when you forget to bargain (as Keegan learnt the hard way), you feel ripped-off and miserable for the rest of the day. It is a safe assumption that as foreigners, we are always told prices double that of what a Nepali would pay. So bargain we must. We have learnt to hassle sellers and sales people at every opportunity to get the lowest price possible, no matter what the starting price is. I have managed to buy a 100% cashmere jumper for 1200Rs (AU25) from the intial ‘fixed’ price of 2500Rs. At one stage, we even tried lowering the price of a few hand-made purses which only really costed us an equivalent of one aussie dollar. Ridiculous, I know, but it adds so much more favour and fun to the shopping, paritcularly so when they speak nepali and we speak english.

More on shopping next time ‘cause time is running out in 2 minutes.

Miss home.