Another quick note -- don't mind me. As you know, the quantity of these updates is likely to drop off in the near future as I slide comfortably into the pattern of laziness I've had for most of my life. I'm leaving Capetown today for Jo-burg. Like my last note implied, Capetown is a bit of a let down in that it's a bit too much like home. It's too easy. Everyone speaks English (even if they might prefer Afrikaans) and the city culture is much the same "global" mishmash of ethnic restaurants and pretty people as you might find in any cosmopolitan city in the western world. The nearest I came to feeling the beat of Capetown while here was during a day I spent in the diamond district downtown. I was walking around aimlessly after having walking through section 6. Section 6 is an area of the city that was razed not long after being declared a "white area". Under apartheid each person was only allowed to live in the areas designated for him to do so. Section 6, being entirely inhabited by non-whites and situated in a highly desirable tract of land just up a hill and adjacent to the city center, was converted by statute into a place where non-whites couldn't live. To this day it's a wasteland of weedy lots and not much else. Swinging through that and finding myself bored and hungry I headed back towards the city center, and that's how I plopped myself into the middle of an interesting situation. As you might know, South Africa is the world's largest producer of diamonds. The omnipresent engagement endorsing mega-corporation De Beers is headquartered here. Figuring that someday, maybe even soon, I'll need to be buying that sort of thing, where better to do it than here? And if I'm going to do it, why not do it as cheaply as possible? So I began to probe the system to find its weaknesses and discovered that cheating it wouldn't be as easy as getting free cable or stealing a car. The diamond district is situated downtown right next to the rail and bus hub. The first thing setting it apart from the jewelry districts I've seen before is that every shop clearly indicates that it's willing to buy diamonds, watches, and jewelry. I suspect that there is a correlation between the insidiously high crime rate and the presense of the "We purchase" signs everywhere. Before even slipping into the first shop I was approached by a young man of who attempted to sell me a pair of sunglasses. I was standing outside a heavily fortified shop with several loose stones on display on a rotating platter. Putting the sunglasses aside my young selling friend asked if it was diamonds in which I was interested. Not sure yet of my course I tentatively said yes and he began to tell me about a friend of his in the Golden Acre a block away who might have something for me. I said "Yes, what's that?" He said "Diamonds". He claimed a diamond for 2000R. He offered to bring! the stone to a shop selected by me to be appraised, but indicated that I couldn't see the friend and that he wasn't sure he could get the stone without some sort of collateral. It got a little confusing after that because he began to tell me about voices in his head and a procedure he was certain was performed on him in a hospital that caused them to come into existence. Curious but underinformed I told him to wait, that I would probably be back in Capetown in several weeks and asked if I could find him on the same corner. He said sure and I was off to an appraiser. I picked the smallest seediest shop I could find and asked the gold incisored proprietor, "How's it work?". He didn't need an explanation. He told me that you'd never find a rough diamond around but that cut stones flowed through the city like pollen during the season when plants make love. I asked him if there was any attempt to track the flow of stolen diamonds and he replied, "If you offer to sell a stone to me, how can I know where you got it?" So he confirmed the flow, trade, and business of "leaked diamonds" and implicitely offered to help. I backed away and went to a middle of the road shop where a very nice woman explained where the stones come from, for at this point I was still having fairy tale dreams of bandits and workers with lead pouches. She said very simply, "They come off a woman's finger....usually....sometimes the finger comes too." She explained the whole process from mine to shop and De Beers figures prominently. Every rough stone discovered in the world is given to De Beers where it is classified, identified, studied, and held long enough to control the market and keep prices high. There are only about 10 people in the world that can purchase rough stones from De Beers and the way the transactions are handled is spectacular. A person with a "site" may purchase a sack of rough stones for a price set by De Beers but cannot stipulate or examine its contents until payment has been made. From that sack and those 10 people all the diamonds on the new diamond market pass to cutters who sell then in wholesale to shops. Due to this arrangement the diamond business operates on relatively low margins (20-25%). Still I had to get a price range so on my way home I squeezed into the oldest cutting and retail loose diamond seller in Cape Town. The place was a mahogany lined bunker, hundreds of years old, defended by the most modern security equipment I've ever seen. When the woman I spoke to at a single desk in the middle of a 20x50x15ft room came back from the safe I understood why. She pulled out a box of 1-3 caret stones in order to help me understand color, clarity, and price. The prices (in US$, De Beers only sells in US$ so there will be no discount in S.A. or anywhere for that matter) for the stones in the box ranged from $10k to $70k and there must have been 500 stones in the box. A place to do careful employee screening I'd say. So that's the diamond trade. You can't buy uncut diamonds. You can't buy direct from the cutters. You must buy retail and they all use the same pricing scheme. It's a tough system. That's all for now.