Leather

While we were in Barcelona, my wife came across a hobby shop in the next street to where we were staying (a street that also had two rival Internet shops, incidentally, both of them run by Indians - Indians from India, that is) which sold leather for use in decoration. Like so many shops in the area it had a tiny frontage, and inside the counter stretched from just by the door to near the back. All along the right wall were little shelves and lockers, and along the left wall were reels and reels of leather in various grades of width and texture.
It immediately became my wife's favourite shop in Barcelona, and she went in there at least three times in the three days we stayed in the city. The place was constantly busy all day - and by all day I mean from the time it opened in the morning (around nine) to the time it shut in the evening (around nine). Some Spanish shops have a siesta; this one didn’t as far as we could tell.
Even though we are already loaded up fairly heavily in terms of what we have to carry around Europe, she bought some leather to use for knots, and perhaps later, to hang the enamel pendants we intend making on.
The Barcelona people obviously use the leather for all sorts of decorations: on purses, and clothing and whatever. You might wonder how such a shop could survive, but it’s obviously been there for decades - maybe more than a century.