You can let your guard down as a tourist in most places in Thailand

I regularly see people that get rather frustrated with the hassle factor of Thailand tourism on a regular basis when I go to that part of town or if I am visiting friends in Bangkok or Phuket. They are sick and tired of being bothered everywhere that they go to spend money by touts or various promotional people.

I understand where they are coming from because especially in certain parts of town, these sales representatives can be rather relentless and yes, it is very annoying. It gets annoying to the point where a lot of tourists or even residents walk around in a sort of defensive "shields up" sort of way and wont so much as be friendly to anyone.

One one side I can understand the frustration but at the same time I think people need to realize that you don't need to be like this all the time just because the watch and fruit and tour package salespeople were bothering you all the time on the beach in Phuket.

I recently encountered a tourist couple in a fruit market in Chiang Mai that were being quite rude towards a woman that was just selling her wares the same as everyone else in a market that is mostly for locals and there are almost zero tourists there ever. I don't think they realized that they were being very rude but they were questioning the woman on her prices per kg and even trying to barter with her over the prices that are clearly marked next to all the fruit and vegetables that were there.

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While you can and definitely should barter over goods that are for sale on the streets all over Thailand and especially to anything that is offered to you by wandering salespeople, the market is not a place to do this. The prices that are written on little pieces of cardboard here are the prices for everyone, not some sort of two-tiered ripoff system that is designed to fleece foreigners.

I can understand why someone might feel that way about things on the street because those people absolutely DO try to get as much out of you as they think they can get but in the market? There is far too much turnover and competition over the same offerings for anyone to bother with something like this.

Things are sold per unit or by the kilogram and I know that they are charging the same price to everyone because even though my Thai language skills are not top notch, I speak it well enough to understand all the numbers and how to ask how much and understand what they are saying back to me.

These tourists were making fools of themselves and kind of making the poor farmer woman lose face over something that she wasn't even guilty of. She was very patient with them though and she didn't really need to be. In other, less friendly nations, the salesperson would have just taken the fruit away from them and then shooed them away.

I didn't intervene and I kind of wish I had now that I am thinking back on it.

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I did overhear them saying that they thought they were getting ripped off for grapes and I wanted to say to them "why is any fruit that doesn't grow in any country more expensive in that country?"

The answer is pretty clear and this is why bananas and mangoes are basically free in Thailand whereas exotic things like grapes, which do not grow in Thailand for the most part and must be imported, are expensive. This is also why most Thai people don't often eat grapes.

I think it is important to keep your guard up whenever you travel anywhere but this doesn't mean that everything you do needs to be some sort of battle. I don't think that is a very relaxing way to spend your vacation anyway, do you?