13th August - a diamond connection (Patreon)

An afternoon of daddy-daughter time swimming with Ophelia playing Shark! Much fun had! We have discovered the most amazing outdoor pool here so we will be back.

This morning though I was doing some editing of this week’s travel vlog and I came across a fascinating fact our guide told to me in the Spice Bazaar in Istanbul... that bizarrely was also linked to my evening dog walk!

Let me explain…around Sant Pere de Ribes where I walk Coco we have an orchard of wild Carob trees. Carob is a chocolate substitute.

It has little pods and in those pods are little seeds (the photo shows these)

The Latin name of the Carob Tree is Ceratonia siliqua. 

And as our guide explained in the Spice Bazaar flowing from this name in ancient times they used to call the seeds 'Carats'.

Each seed has strangely uniform weight of 0.2g.

Because all the seeds weigh the same, before they had measuring weights, ancient traders of diamond and other precious stones used to use the carat seeds as the scale to measure the size of diamonds.

To this day 1 ‘carat’ is still 0.2g.

I would never have put a diamond and a carob treee together but it I find it fascinating to think they have this ancient link!