Friday morning we were up bright and early! After a traditional French breakfast (tea, juice, croissant, baguette, yogurt, grapes...), served by the lovely Eva--who is about 4'10" and just about the most friendly and excited person you'll ever meet, we headed off in a taxi to the Paris Knife Show. The show is currently located in a large warehouse building on the outskirts of Paris (much to the frustration of the participants who are disgusted with the price of participating and what they receive in return) and there are roughly 120 participants. Upon arrival, we were ushered to our table and I helped to unpack the knives and organize them into a display. Grace (a knife maker from the UK, who is a good friend of Ed's) and I carefully placed the knives in an organized fashion--even drawing out a map of where the knives were located on the table. Apparently this was the most organized Ed's table has ever been. ;)
Of course, I was desperate to have a cheat sheet of names/prices since he spent some of his time visiting with other knife makers around the room and I needed to know how much to sell the knives for.
The day was very fun--I did some translating (although much of the knife making vocabulary was waaaay over my head...) and spent most of my time hanging out with Grace and drinking white wine! My responsibility was to greet people when they stopped by the table and tell them the price when they asked.
If they wanted to buy one, I would package it up and take their money. Pretty simple, so it left me lots of time to people-watch and eavesdrop!
The table next to us was taken by two guys selling swords. The owner of the company was from Denmark and spoke English really well. I got to chat with him a bit, and he helped me when I tried to translate something into French for a guy who spoke Danish...oops! His helper was French, but he also spoke English. It was rather entertaining to watch the helper demonstrate with swords that were nearly as tall as he was. I kept waiting for him to cut the limb off an unsuspecting passerby.
After the show, Matt, Ed, and I took off on the metro, headed towards a Thai restaurant for dinner. We met up with Patrick and his wife (I never quite got her name!) and had another entertaining meal. Patrick is extremely exuberant (especially as he uses expletives every other sentence when speaking in English) and gets very into whatever he happens to be talking about. It was during this dinner that Matt informed them that I could understand French-- which, of course, led to them trying to get me to speak French. It wasn't that I was refusing flat out, but when someone tells you "Go! Speak French right now!"--your brain goes completely blank! I said a few little comments in French, but nothing too exciting. Mostly I found it much more interesting to just listen to their conversation and stories.
The Thai food was authentic and amazing. I had a papaya salad and vegetable curry--and a tiny sip of this really intense rice alcohol drink that they gave us for free at the end. Suuuuper strong! I didn't get past the first sip.
We made it back to the hotel at midnight and had to be up at 8am for another long day...
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