At the end of fall break in 2015, I left behind my water bottle in an unofficial taxi while I was coming to Abu Dhabi from Al Ain. In my diary, I’ve written:

I saw the X90 leaving just as my cab was pulling up at the Al Ain bus terminal. So now, there I was, standing outside with about 20 guys in shalwar kameezain yelling Dubai and Abu Dhabi at me, and the next bus wasn’t leaving until half an hour later. I thought, Why not? Screw it. I followed one of them after making sure the price was okay. It would be quicker than taking the bus, anyway.

Here is where I start being a bad person. The thing is, the taxi service isn’t exactly official, so to pass the time on the way over, my mind started reminding me about everything I know of illegal taxis I learned during orientation in Buenos Aires — different scenarios in which I was driven into an empty warehouse and had my organs harvested popped into my head. I also remembered the Simpsons episode in Brazil. Of course I knew that nothing would happen to me, since this was the UAE, not Brazil. Still, as we dropped off the first two passengers at the various labor camps outside Abu Dhabi, I kept a lookout for the warehouse.

Of course, the guy eventually pulled over across from a bus station, asking if it would be fine to drop me there. Seeing as I was disappointed by nothing bad happening to me yet, I thought, But what if he drives off with my bag still in the trunk, I should definitely be preoccupied with that unlikely scenario. And that is how I forgot to worry about a more likely candidate for never seeing my belongings again — you know, leaving my dear water bottle on the seat of the car.

I didn’t even realize it was missing until I was getting out of the cab that took me back to campus and my routine mental question — do you have everything? — popped into my head.

Just because somebody is running a technically illegal taxi service does not necessarily mean they want to steal anything. But if you distrust them, you will forget to worry about the water bottle you bought only two weeks ago at the steep price of 86 AED.

Recently, I visited Sri Lanka for fall break. Here, I realized that I was falling into similar patterns. At every business interaction where bargaining seemed like a possibility, and even where it didn’t, I always felt like I was getting screwed over. After years of being told that people like screwing over obvious tourists, and dealing with people who wanted to screw me over because I was an obvious tourist, I felt cheated when I had to pay 80 rupees — the equivalent of less than two dirhams — for a large water, the same price I would pay at the dining hall on campus. The same thing applied to the cost of tuktuks. I had read online that our tuktuk ride from the bus station should cost only about 120 rupees — three dirhams — but it wound up costing 300, equivalent to seven and a half dirhams. The guy had no meter, and I didn’t want to argue, so I paid, but I was still convinced that I was getting ripped off.

The next day, at a different place, the water still cost two dirhams, and a metered tuktuk still cost 300 rupees back to the station, and on the third day our vendor, sensing my continuing bafflement at the water’s disproportionately high price, pointed at the label of the bottle stating the same price. I felt like an asshole again. Why was I being so inherently distrustful of people? Yes, tourists are supposed to get ripped off, and to a certain extent, maybe I feel like they deserve to be ripped off. So when the three of us — white guys in tie dye shirts, a look that only old German men in socks and sandals could beat for most obvious tourists — were walking around the streets of Colombo or Hikkaduwa, I just expected to be ripped off at every corner.

However, over the course of the entire trip, I can only think of two people who really tried to rip us off: a tuktuk driver in Colombo and, more surprisingly, a Buddhist monk at Adam’s Peak. I expected it from the tuktuk driver, since you can never weed out all bad experiences, but the monk? Walking up Adam’s Peak, there are multiple stalls with monks inside, and in exchange for a donation, they tie a little wristband on you and bless both it and you. They have books where you write in your name and your donation amount. At the bottom of the trail, the somewhat compulsory donation seemed to be around 1000 rupees — 25 AED — based on what was written in the book. Somehow by the time people got to the second stall, the donations were all around 2000 or 5000 rupees — the equivalent of 50 or 125 AED — even though my initial impulse would have been to give less. But I looked down again, and thought, really, nobody gave 1000, or even 500? Are people really feeling that generous? Upon closer inspection, I realised that some of the final zeroes looked just a little different from the previous ones on some of the donations – as if they had been written in by the monk himself. The Buddhist monk, arguably a character idealized beyond any reality, was trying to rip people off by guilt-tripping them into giving higher donations.

But what I found out was that even though I wasn’t innately distrustful of the monk, as I had been of many of the street vendors, I could still smell the bullshit when it was there. So I guess the moral of the story, if there is any, is that being suspicious at all times can end up letting you down, as you end up feeling bad for not giving people the benefit of the doubt. Of course, still being in the present moment and smelling the bullshit when it’s there is important. I might not be a science major anymore, but I still know two trips is not a good enough sample size to make any generalizations about your chance of being ripped off. But being aware of overpaying, without treating everything and everyone with suspicion is probably a healthier road to take. Of course, this is infinitely easier when you actually know what reasonable prices are. Maybe I’m just advocating for trust and compassion because I have readings about Buddhism for class so often that not even a crooked monk can break my convictions.