Friday, November 11, 2011

Night Market Karma

Allow me to welcome your imaginations once again to New York City, the place where dreams are made of. If I could compare this place to anything it would be like straddling a mountain lion, drunk… whilst trying to complete a Sudoku puzzle! The fact is as soon as you arrive here, your mind is struggling to concentrate because there is so much to take in. You look left and you look right… the more you look around the more you come to terms with how this place has become one of the most iconic cities in the world. It quite literally has everything.

But rather than bore you with stories of New York and whatever else, I will tell you about a specific moment whilst touring the Big Apple in which Rheannon and I encountered a night market… you know one of these places where you can pick up a stuffed corgi signed by Prince Philip and a ham and cheese bagel all within a few hundred yards.

Karma… a mystery, or a given? I’m personally undecided because I think that you make your own luck in this world. However I also believe that if you do well to someone you are entitled to a bit of luck… therefore ‘making’ your luck, if that makes sense. So here’s the situation that I was faced with.

It was around seven o’clock and we had devoured dinner in a restaurant at Times Square… so of course we were homing in on the night market which we had spotted a few nights previous. Why? Because we had seen that there were stalls for crepes and waffles which, at the time, we found intriguing. So we find a table in the centre of the packed market and decide to take it in turns to grab whatever food we desire. Rheannon goes first, and she wants a waffle, but not just any waffle… she wants a waffle dripping with chocolate sauce and smothered in ice cream, and who can blame her? She arrives back with the waffle and it makes me feel hungrier than an obese person fasting, so I go off in search of my chosen dessert.

I find a stall which does nutella chocolate crepes and I decide that this is the place for me. So I order, and the guy at the station looks at me and tells me to hang on a minute… I look around and see a small queue of people waiting for their food, so I fall in eagerly behind them. As I do this I notice that these people are simply taking their crepes and leaving to eat them… at which point I realise that the guy taking orders had forgotten to relieve me of my money.

Result… I can walk away from here with a free crepe, and as you know, the notion of getting anything for free is highly regarded in this day and age. But I’m bigger than this, “these guys are working hard,” I think to myself. So I decide to come clean and let the guy know that he’s in fact an idiot and forgotten to do the one thing he’s employed to do. At this point I’m feeling jubilation… because I have chosen not to take advantage of innocence and to instead be honest and tell the truth. So what if I’ve passed up the opportunity to gain an overpriced French dessert for nothing, I feel good about myself god-damn-it! That is until I discover my honesty has granted me the gift of karma… because you see I have handed over a $20 dollar bill to pay, and yes I’ve cracked a joke about how amazing I am for telling the truth. He hands me my change and as I walk away I become conscious of the fact that my supposed $15 dollars change has become $55 dollars! How is this possible I hear you ask? I have no damn idea!

Either way I am now approaching Rheannon grasping $50 bucks more than I should be, and after my decisive moment of honesty I decide that I have paid my dues and that this is the action of ‘karma.’

So I ask my dear readers… how did I find the goodness within me to admit to the first mistake and not the second? I blamed it on ‘karma,’ what’s your excuse?

The Night Market at Union Square

Rheannon with her waffle

2 comments:

  1. Hahaha, Brilliant Buddy. as you always say "god loves winners"

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  2. Interesting post, I am so glad that I have visited your site. Such a wonderful time reading this.

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