No tour is complete without being dragged to factories where the locals pander their wares. The first we were brought to was a pearl factory. For those of you who don't know how these things work, it goes like this: your tour guide brings you to a factory where you are greeted by a small (or maybe not so small) army of sales people. They usher you into some kind of demonstration room where they show you how they do whatever it is they do and do their best to convince you of the superiority of their product over the cheaper products you can find elsewhere. Then, you are brought into a room full of overpriced things that you don't need or want and they make you try them on or test them out while they use every hard sales technique in the book to guilt you into buying something. Thankfully, everyone in our party is immune to this kind of sales technique, so we left without buying anything. I'm glad we went, though, because the pearl factory provided a great story.
We were in the "explain room" (the sign said so) and some dude was telling us about the different kinds of pearls you can get from oysters and how they are formed, etc. He pulled an unfortunate oyster from a tank and asked us how many pearls we thought were inside. I knew where this was headed and didn't like it. Somebody probably guessed because the next thing I knew, he was heading over to a table with some surgical instruments on it.
"You don't have to do that!" I explained (in the explain room). My mom even looked a little squeamish.
With a maniacal look on his face he muttered under his breath, "No, I must!" and plunged the knife between the shells.
R.I.P. little oyster.
PS: Nine little pearls inside our dear friend.
