Amarillo and Apple Tea

It's taken me six months to finally go in a Turkish carpet store. I have walked by them many many times over the past few months and been encouraged by salesmen to just come in and take a look at what they had to offer, but I've always been nervous about what the experience would be like once I was inside. I would like to bring home a rug that I can say was handmade here in Turkey, but I still don't really know what I'm looking for.

So, we went in a store today. We walk in and the salesman says hello in perfect English. He asks what we are looking for and I look to my right and see a runner so I point and say that's what I'm interested in (I figured it was not to small to offend him and not too large to be astronomically priced). He motions for us to take a seat on the sofa and the madness begins. Another salesman brings us apple tea freshly brewed and together three of them spend the next 15 minutes bringing out rug after rug after rug. Each one has a different story that he loves to tell. All handmade (maybe). All different colors. By the end it is quite overwhelming. Then he takes a break and talks with us a while. He asked us where we were from and then said he also has a friend from Texas who just came to visit him (might or might not be true) then said he drove through Amarillo, Texas once and had a great hamburger (again might or might not be true, but I'm impressed if it is true).

Then we got back to the topic of rugs and he asked me to choose the ones that I liked. I chose only four from the thirty or so he had put before me. Two wool and two silk. He says what nice choices I made (would he tell a customer he/she made a bad choice?) then describes the motifs in the two silk rugs and then the regions that the two wool rugs come from. Then I said, "So this is the part where we talk about price..." He laughed and said, "If that's how you do it in Texas." Surprisingly, all four prices he gave we found reasonable. Since we just started looking I wasn't ready to pull the trigger yet, so we began the exit process. As we're trying to leave he comes down on the price on all four rugs and asks us to reconsider. We said thanks and that we'd come again. One rug shop experience is enough for one day, but now I am intrigued to meet other salesmen who perhaps have driven through Amarillo as well.