Although I don't like this picture a lot, I'd have to show it in this page in order to remind myself of this interesting experience of mine for the past five days.
I was accidentally chosen to participate in the Asia's biggest jewellery fair held in Hong Kong Exhibition Centre. It's my very first time to work there, even though I had gone there for book fairs and so on, working there is definitely a new experience for me.
On the first half of my first day, I was assigned to help in a diamond retail booth. Nothing much happened since the diamond necklaces and rings were in fact, not attractive in my opinion. But then interesting things happened. I was told to help in another booth, a pearl wholesale booth. Man, how crazy the customers were!! When I helped them unwrapped bags of valuable pearls, many impatient customers were already starting to peak in and pick up the ones they wanted.
Ignorant as I was, I didn't know the price of pearls until then. I was told that each pearl they had costed around 200 US dollars. In addition, since we were wholesalers, we have to sell the whole pack instead of partially. THere are at least 100 pearls in each bag...... I was surprised as well when seeing so many people from all around the country getting very involved and interested in this kind of business. To me, they all looked like white M & M's.......
The pearl wholesale company I helped was actually from Japan, although the owners are from India. They even brought a Japanese-national staff with them to this jewellery fair. Interesting interaction of languages happened within these five days. Whenever we didn't want customers to know what we were saying, we would use a language that was not understood by them. It was funny and interesting. Japanese, English, Cantonese and Mandarin....... I wish I could speak Indian too....Heheee.
So what I have learned from this fair is not just the value of pearls, but the bargaining strategies, more Japanese, how screwed up the Exhibition Centre was and the beauty of the night scenery of Hong Kong. On the last day, I was finally tempted to buy two 18K Gold pendants and a necklace chain for myself. How I wish I could afford to buy some pearls for memory's sake, but they were just too expensive. In fact, after knowing the price of wholesale pearls, I think I will not buy any pearls from retail shops in future.
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