Street vendors in Mumbai

Can’t go anywhere in India without being swarmed by street vendors selling junk. They’re aggressive, too, and they sell every tourist knick-knack you can think of: maps of India, post cards, bangles, crazy-looking toys, costume jewelry–and the standard price is 100 rupees, it seems.  Our tour guide advised us to avoid eye contact and not even look at the goods, because if we did, we’d never get rid of them.

He was right.

Still, from time to time we wanted to buy some cheap stuff. So a few times during the trip, he held a “bus bazaar.”  He’d ask a few of the vendors to give him a handful of their goods and he’d bring it into the bus to ask if we wanted to buy, leaving the vendors outside (or we’d probably still have a few on our trip with us).

The bus bazaars were a lot of fun and never failed to crack me up.  Here’s a video of one, featuring our tour guide: