What's New-Ste.-Marie-aux-Mines Show 2017

摘要

It was a hot day in June 1986 when first I drove from my home in Germany southwards into the French department of Alsace, hard by the Rhine, to visit the Ste.-Marie-aux-Mines Show in order to write my first show report for the Mineralogical Record. Between then and now there has been much change in the show scene, but much has also remained the same (including that "hot" element). The show's ongoing success has led to a doubling at least in its size since those early days: the old Theater building is still the main social ganglion, high-end dealer redoubt, and general headquarters, but all around it, each year, more and more perky white dealers' tents have sprouted like mushrooms in happy, abundant rain. Move away from the Theater through the maze of the tents and you'll pass the Piscine building, with its inviting, unused swimming pool, aquamarine in color, surrounded by dealers' stands. You'll pass open courtyards with tents full of diverse wholesale material, and fossils, and gewgaws, and great chunks of lapis and jadeite and petrified wood. You'll pass booths of gwindel-marketing cristalliers just down from the mountains. And you'll come at last to the two "Val Expo" halls, where hundreds of dealers from everywhere are densely packed in commercial welter and summery swelter with not enough electric fans around. Between these two halls is a thematic Special Exhibit-"Exposition Prestige"-which has seemed to improve each year since it started a few years ago. And elsewhere around the show grounds, besides many refreshment stands (try the Kronenbourg beer, always ice-cold out of the taps), there's a big food tent with Alsatian specialties, a Feng Shui garden, a play-park for children, a little white toy train tootling around, and other features not yet thought of when I was a cub reporter.