Some Italian friends, designers, have been here this week to visit two big Paris trade fairs, Bijorhca for jewelry (including costume jewelry) and Maison et Objet for home design. It was bad luck for the fairs that they coincided with Paris's biggest snowfall in years. The city of Paris cannot deal at all with even a few inches of snow, and comes to a complete halt, for some unknown reason; a lot of people probably abandoned the idea of going in the difficult circumstances. One metro actually got stuck on a bridge while going over the Seine and they had to evacuate all the passengers. Boats came to help in case anyone fell in!
Anyway, my Italians eventually made it both fairs, and today they left on Air France. "Oh, it's nice you're on Air France," I remarked. "They have the only nice terminals at the airport."
"It was like that at Bijorhca, too," said one. "We talked to a bunch of the exhibitors. They had had to organize their exhibits long in advance to have a good location at the fair. Then, only a couple of weeks ago, they received a notice that their location had been changed. And when they arrived for the fair, they found that all the French were in the center, in the good locations. And all the foreign exhibitors were in the outer darkness!"
