Carl and Glenna spent all day running around the Lakefront building. They were there from 8:30 in the morning until 5 o'clock at night.
Most of their time was spent visiting various vendors. Carl tells me that he had identified 50 different vendors that he was interested in, but in the 8 hours they were there, he and Glenna were only able to see about 40. Most of those were brief visits, dropping off cards, picking up information; they spent more time perusing the booths of vendors we already, visiting with them and discovering new products.
The Shun booth was a big attraction, and not just because they had Alton Brown.(Of course Glenna got an autograph, are you crazy? His blend of cooking and science is irresistible.)
As we were saying before the digression, the knives themselves are lovely. Shun also had some awesome limited edition steak knives. It looks like other people thought so, too; apparently it was a bit hard to get a close look.
Sadly, Carl's camera hates the new computer, so we have a lot less pictures of the Housewares Show than we'd hoped to have. From what we have, you can get an idea of how crowded and busy the vendors room was. My feet would have fallen off from all of that walking around.
One of our favorite vendors, Dovo, was at the Show! Luckily, they had plenty of chairs, so Carl and Glenna got a bit of a rest. Dovo supplies all of our manicure sets and a large percentage of our sewing and hair scissors/shears, and individual manicure implements. Here's a picture of Anne Rothstein, Jens, and Glenna. Jens is a German representative of the company, who we get to see every so often. He travels around once a year with a huge bag of manicure sets, so that Carl can look at them before deciding what to order for the next year. Everyone in the store gets a chance to ooh and aah, it's always a lot of fun. Just hope that Jens doesn't test your German skills! (Mine are, admittedly, horrible.)
To be continued...