At the jade store, there was a guy that painted by hand. By "hand", I mean exactly that - he didn't use a brush. He uses a bowl of ink & water, and uses his hand itself to smear ink onto paper to produce excellent paintings.
For the fine detail work, he uses a long fingernail on his hand to do the painting.
From the jade store, we went to a jewelry wholesale "mall." In this 4+ story mall, each of the little shops was a jewelry wholesaler, specializing in jade, minerals, silver, and who knows what all else.
For a guy that's not into jewelry, and has only bought pearls once or twice in the past, the pearl shop was AMAZING!
You walk into this place, and they've got gallon ziploc bags full of pearl earring sets (white/yellow/pink/black/multi-colored pearls). There are 10-15 gallon bags of stranded pearls stacked up along the walls...5 or 10 gallon Rubbermaid type clear plastic boxes full of stranded pearls stacked up alongside the walls.
Our guide pretty well said "don't worry about the price"...that's just about how cheap they were (OK, some were more expensive, but only for the very high grade pearls).
When I was nearly done buying stranded pearl necklaces, bracelets (you can have 2 made per strand of pearls), pearl this and pearl that, I realized that I hadn't bought anything for me!!!! I bought a single black pearl to have made into a pendant. They brought out a card of these pearls, each about 0.4-0.6" diameter. The pearls were actually stuck onto a piece of what looked like Duct Tape. 17 pearls were on the card I saw (all they had, no bigger pearls available from nearby vendors, and I believe them...they'd have sold me a bigger pearl if they had it), with the card worth ~$2550 (about $150 per pearl). That's the price in China...I'm sure US price would be much more. So you bought a strand of pearls...you decide on type of clasp (double locking is best)...they would double knot each pearl onto the strand for free (US cost just for this is ~$100).
I explained to our FTIA guides what the phrase "Feeding Frenzy" (a pack of sharks or piranhas going after meat in the water, making the water look like it's boiling). They got a kick out of this new phrase. There were about a dozen people in our group at the store, and we kept the 7 salesgirls (OK, 1 sales guy) busy selling & re-knotting pearls).
While at the store, I also got a pint bag of pearls for Alan's 1st Grade class at school. These weren't jewelry grade pearls, but were instead sold by the kilogram for use in skin creams. The little girls in his class kept asking "are these REALLLL pearls????".
Critters made of pearls
Shiny Baubles!
More shiny baubles!
Mark (from our adoption travel group) and his daughter.
"Stick with me, kiddo, and someday all this will be yours!"
Here's me in my finest evening wear. Overdone? Naaaaaah! Just like firearms...you can't have enough of them. Then again, there's the "pearls before swine" saying.
Black Pearls (natural color, NOT dyed) from Tahiti.
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