Bargaining

Bargaining is not a skill I excel at in my own language, much less in a foreign tongue. Since my computer crashed and I lost all the music I brought over here I've been trying to crack into the used cd market. But it's hard to know what the fair rate is. In my first effort, I simply payed asking price for a Dyaln cd--20 kuai or about two and a half dollars--a move I knew was a mistake. So when I say a copy of Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" in a stall near the south gate of our campus where there are a lot of shops, I was determined to do a little bargaining. I asked the price with about the first words of Chinese that anyone learns "dou shou qian" (how much is it). The asking price was 25 kuai or a little over three bucks and she sowned me the sticker. Indeed, unlike the other place I was at, these cds were marked. I came back at 10, a price I realized was probably low. She looked at me and said "twenty" (ar shi). I came up to fifteen and even pulld the money out of my wallet to show I was serious. But she would not budge, not even when I walked away. Now, true, it was a new cd that had plastic wrap around it. But in a place where you can pick up dvds for 5 kuai or around 80 cents, I truly expected a better rate on used cds. But at least I learned that the lao wai discount seems to be about 25 percent.