Every two years, something special happens in Europe. Courtesy of host Saint-Gobain, loads of drywallers, plasterers and builders from each corner of the world gather together to attend a truly remarkable event: to compete to see who is named “the best” in several different categories. And this year’s 11th Annual Gypsum Trophy Awards event, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in late March, showed just who’s the best of the best.
The brilliance of this event—despite its scale, extravagance, exotic locations, logistics—is that it gives contractors an opportunity to really introduce themselves to one another that would otherwise have no opportunity to meet under normal conditions. So, the common tongue is typically English but if you know French, Deutsch, Spanish or Mandarin, it might help you communicate with your Northern vs. Southern Hemisphere counterpart.