12.20.07

Fair enough, I didn’t really keep up on the blog this buying trip.  Last we left off  it was my first full day of the buying trip.  Off to a couple meetings.  First with the guy that I buy the root consoles and butterfly tables from.  It's quite an operation.  He is constantly scouring the region – both personally and through his sources – for all of this great reclaimed wood.  The whole process is quite a sight to see.  From the old gnarled, dirt caked tree stumps complete with the main root ball, to the cutting with custom three foot long chain saws, to the kilns for drying, back to more cutting, then each piece is assigned what it is going to become.  The root consoles cost a fair amount of money, but once you see the whole operation, it's no wonder why.  Same goes for the butterfly tables, consoles and dining tables.  It's an amazing amount of work, cutting these huge slabs of wood without the benefit of fixed in place saws.  It's all done by hand.  If you could picture a four foot diameter log that expands to five and six feet – you can't send it to a mill or anything like that here.  It sits on the ground, the cutters set up planks on top of it, then they stand on top of the log with these dirty great chain saws and proceed to cut a straight plank then length of the log, four to six feet deep, eight, ten twelve feet long.  If you pictured one of those old school hardboiled egg cutters, you know, the kind where you set the shelled egg in the plastic receptacle and then push the hinged bladed thing that cuts right through the egg making these perfect little slices with the egg still sitting there as if nothing happened.  Same thing with these logs, except instead of a nice easy to cut through egg that you can do with minimal force from your index finger, it's hours – days of work to cut these planks out of the log for the tables.  All quite impressive.

Next to the place I get the curly vines and other various things, the rough lacquered little log side tables, the sugar grinder side tables, wood on a stand, other things.  His specialty is finding every day objects and turning them into art pieces, or functional things, or both.  It's also something that I really like doing, so we spend quite some time going over possibilities, 95% of which fall immediately to the floor , but some ideas actually stay on the table.  He will make some samples and send photos, and the process moves forward, some are discarded, some tweaked and sent back to sampling, others are on the money.  That’s the process.

After that it's back to the hotel for a short nap, and then dinner with the same guy from the last paragraph and his family.  It's a really nice dinner at a little local place on the river in Chiang Mai, making for a very nice evening.  

The next day brought a combination of things.  The first stop is out to my main ceramics place, there I spend a few hours going over what’s new, work on some new designs, change some glazes and go on my merry way back into town.

There is this place in a touristy area of Chiang Mai that I usually shy away from, but they have this collection of absolutely beautiful cloisonne work.  It's expensive.  But cloisonne is expensive everywhere.  My problem is I don’t know if this little shop is having it made, you know, designing it and all that – or are they just buying it from someone.  If they are just buying it from someone, then there is no way I am going to get a good price.  If they are making it themselves, then there is a chance.  It's just stunning stuff.  So I go back (I was there before) and happen to arrive when the owner is there.  Turns out they are a company form France that has their own designers and they have a factory in China that produces it.  That’s good news for me.  Although, it's still expensive stuff, but I’ve been looking at it for over a year now, so I figure its time to take the first step.  I buy a few pieces and I’ll have them sent air freight with some other stuff, put them in the booth at New York and see what happens.  It won’t be a money maker for me, but it gives me an additional look that I really want in my ceramics line.

Part of the day was spent shooting something for Travel Channel.  Now let me remind you that I am on this trip on my own.  No camera crew - we're not even offically a series yet.  The set up was this.  John – the producer from the production company – sends me an e-mail saying Travel wants a little ten second thing of me saying “Happy New Year from Thailand join me next year as I blaa blaa blaa.”  I have good HD Sony camera, so I can get good quality for them, but I don’t have a shooter.  So I wind up at this weekend market that is all festive with booths selling food, tourist junk, clothing, hundreds of people and festive things like cloth lanterns hanging all over the place.  So here I am with my camera at arm’s length filming myself walking around the market, doing take after take, having the scene behind me picked out, returning to my mark and starting over each time I screwed it up.  “Hi, I’m Ian Grant in Northern Thailand wishing you a Happy New Year from Northern Thailand, join me this year . . .crap . . . “  “Hi,  I’m Ian Grant Wishing you Happy New Year . . .,”  “Hi I’m Ian Grant wishing you a Happy New Year from Northern Thailand, join me next year as I travel the world delving into . .”  I don’t say ‘delving’  why did I say delving? . . .back to the spot where I started. . . “Hi, I’m Ian Grant wishing you a happy new year from Northern Thailand.  Join me next year as I travel the world looking for amazing stuff.”  So every now and then I would get it right, and if nothing else I was entertaining all the locals at all the stalls.  There was one guy that filmed it for me a couple times.  After the market, I gave up on it until the next day.  If I have a chance, I’ll add a little bit of the video here in the next couple of days.

That night it was off to the super expensive Chedi Hotel on the river – rooms starting at $300 a night and going up.  But for whatever reason, the restaurants there weren’t too expensive.  Well they were expensive by Thailand standards, but really they were $30-$40 dinners, so I figured I could go there at least once.  Now if you remember last year’s trip, I went to the same hotel and had they this jazz band with a sax player that played everything just quarter tone out of key, which killed me.  I could have cut and pasted that blog entry and put it back in this year’s episode.  The up side was the band wasn’t featuring the sax player as much as last time, and all the other players were pretty good.  He did however absolutely make a mockery out of Stan Getz’s Girl from Ipanema.  But it was still a good meal in a beautiful setting.

The next morning –the last day- I realized I could get someone at the little hotel to film another shot at this Travel spot, so I enlist one of the receptionists and she films me coming out of the little hotel which is in essence an reproduction of an old Thai house in an old Thai neighborhood, so it looked quite good.  She shot it twice and I figured that was enough rather than overstay my welcome.  Looking at it later I realized that for much of it I was in the lower third of the frame – just a head and shoulders sort of floating along the lower part of the frame.  I then go on to a little shop that has some nice things, and when I am done with the shopping/running a business thing, I ask one of the ladies there to shoot a couple takes.  

The rest of the day was was spent trying to finalize things, buy some gifts, finish up out at the butterfly table guy’s place and then off to the airport, fly to Bangkok and check into the hotel.  A little workout, a little dinner, a movie, a hour hour sleep and then up at 4.15 am and off to the airport for the 6am, flight to Tokyo (breakfast, sleep, movie, sleep, coffee land), then Tokyo to Minneapolis (got the upgrade on this one – half glass of champage – still crappy champagne but one has to keep up appearances, movie, dinner, wine, water, movie, water, sleep, stare out window, read book, coffee, land 10 hours later).

So here we are at home, ttrying to put the whole trip together as far as finalizing purchases, make sure prototypes are moving forward, shipments moving along, ducks in the correct rows and all that.  Second night of sleep, jet lag kicking in big time, waking up at 3am, trying to convince myself for the next two hours to stop staring at the ceiling and go back to sleep, finally giving up at 5am and putting the final touches on this blog entry. All part of the charm of international buying.