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Funny Challenge In Sri Lanka's Biggest Market 🇱🇰
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Funny Challenge In Sri Lanka’s Biggest Market 🇱🇰
A light one, and useful mainly as a price list. Harry and Ali split up in Pettah market in Colombo with an hour or two each and a rule: buy the other person the most ridiculous thing you can find, and he has to wear it.
Obs: this page is based on auto-generated subtitles.
What things cost
Everything below is haggled, and none of it takes long.
- A counterfeit smartwatch: asked 600, paid 400 — about $2.50. It turns on and shows a time, and that is the whole of his review.
- Sunglasses: asked 550, agreed 400, and he pays 600 because the seller was working hard.
- A wig: 300, and he pays over on the grounds that the price was honest without being asked.
- A counterfeit branded shirt: asked 990, paid 800 — under $5.
- Socks: 150. He tries to hand over 200 and the seller will not take the extra.
- Fruit and jelly sweets: around 100 rupees.
How the market is laid out
The genuinely transferable observation, and he works it out by getting lost:
- Stalls repeat. Long runs of them sell the same things.
- One block off the main run and the tourists stop entirely — a working area where he is stared at, everyone is at a job, and there is nothing he could buy.
- One block back and it is the tourist street again, though he notes even that is mostly locals.
- Indoor halls hold the densest part of it.
- The roads through it are live: cars, tuk-tuks and motorbikes moving through the same space as the crowd.
- Some sellers buy from other stalls and resell on foot, walking the market with an armful of stock. He wonders aloud whether it works.
Sellers here are not pushy. He says so twice, and specifically that big markets usually have people working an angle and he hasn’t met one — two days after the shoe cleaner, a few streets away.
The first note on the economy
Said in passing and worth flagging, because it is the only time it comes up in three weeks: the financial situation in Sri Lanka is bad at the moment, and his read is that this is why sellers are so eager to get anyone into their shop.
The trip is filmed in March 2022.
The exchange
Harry finds Ali a bright wig and gets it on him. Ali’s present is a new pair of shoes — a direct replacement for the trainers ruined by the shoe cleaner two days earlier, which Harry had given away at this same market. He is visibly caught out, having expected something stupid.
Key moments
[03:12]The watch stall, and 400 rupees.[06:25]One block off, and no tourists at all.[06:55]One block back, and the tourist street.[07:57]Paying 600 on a 400 agreement.[09:30]300 for the wig, and paying over for an honest price.[13:47]800 for the shirt.[16:24]The shoes.[18:34]150 socks, and a seller who refuses a tip.[19:36]The economy, and why the sellers are desperate.