Joined: Sat Jan 26, 2008 4:55 pm Posts: 179 Location: London, UK
Yes, warm and exotic would be good - is currently cold, raining and miserable here!
Am thinking Burma is going to be a must on my list - before the hordes descend. It looks glorious in Vlad's photos and on the BBC coverage. I was lucky enough to spend time in Nepal and Thailand in the mid-70's before the days of the Gap Year student.
Am thinking Burma is going to be a must on my list - before the hordes descend.
I was on a Thailand forum recently where there was a large discussion about Myanmar/Burma being a huge, untapped land for potential foreigner sex tourism. Loads of these farang were looking to get over there for that reason, it seemed.
Throw in the Khaosan Road crowd, and the pseudo-hippies, and it'll be all over.
Hope they can open up, while avoiding all that, but it seems to be the way of South-East Asia. Malaysia has sort-of dodged it over the years though...
Joined: Tue May 08, 2012 5:26 am Posts: 28 Location: Sweden
Most is said here about the + and - at the conference, agrees that especially Hainswang, but also Kiefert & Hughes was the more rewarding lectures, Williams was good but he was mainly stating the obvious concerning the instruments. Sisk and Ringsrud gave less, the reasons for this is mentioned earlier in this discussion. Zwaans presentation was ok, I did not know about the automatic sorting technique (seemed similar to the ones used at diamondmines) was used also for emerald, wish he had gone deeper into the technology behind it. Whalleys presentation on renaissance gemsetting was quite good though it seems that there is a lot more to investigate in this area, at least I now know why the diamonds in paintings from the time are so dark... I hope she will publish her work because this area lacks research and reference material.
I agree with Karl that the sauna like environment at the end of the conference heattreated both gems and gemmologists but also that the grading seminar with Richard Drucker was very interresting. As it seems difficult to establish a gradingsystem for colored stones accepted by everyone I guess the important thing is to use systems that atleast identifyes what is good and what is bad and is usable together with available pricinglists and as Gemworld is developing a gradingsystem as well as publishing pricinglists makes their system easy to apply to their lists. The version we got to try out (which is under development) was easy to use but the amount of grades was quite limited and it had more to wish for concerning colorzoned, strongly pleocroic and colorchanging stones. It will be interresting to see this product fully developed.
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