Jewlery
My wife and I were on holiday in Bangkok a couple of years ago and we saw posters advertising an international Jewlery Exhibition. We should go, suggested my wife. It’s international - everyone there will speak English, right? We took a cab to the exhibition center which was bigger than anything we had ever seen. So was the actual exhibition. There were thousands of jewelry stalls and kiosks, crowds of people milling about and very few English speakers. We saw incredible jewelry.
We wandered from stall to stall and looked at the goods on exhibition. There was jewelry from every imaginable country and made from every imaginable material, all the way down from gold to horse-hair. There were also many stalls showing jewelry making materials such as precious and semi-precious stones. There were stalls that featured jewelry making tools and equipment from a pair of miniature pliers for beadwork to huge industrial drums for milling the stones. We saw reels of nylon fishing line to silver and gold wire for threading beads onto.
There were men and women bent over worktables giving ‘live’ exhibitions of various jewelry making techniques. We watched steady hands painting shells to make beautiful earrings and we watched eyes peering in heavy concentration as hands threaded tiny stones onto almost invisible wires. I think that was when we decided that we were not going into the jewelry manufacturing business!