Christmas Bazaar
Friday 12/18/2009 10:26 AM
I've been loosely affiliated with the International Women's Club since shortly after I arrived in Podgorica. Which means that I get emails announcing their meetings, but 99% of the meetings conflicted with my teaching schedule so I haven't actually been all that active. A little over a month ago, though, I was able to attend a planning meeting for the American table at the International Christmas Bazaar at Delta City, the shopping mall here in Podgorica. This is the first big event that the IWC has held since becoming an NGO this fall, and my official duty was to wrap some empty boxes to serve as decoration for the table. I thought that was manageable enough, until I realized how difficult it is to find empty boxes in Podgorica. After casually peeking into dumpsters ass I passed them for a couple of weeks, a couple nights before the bazaar, Alex and I went on a full-fledged dumpster dive and managed to snag three boxes. Wouldn't you know that on the following night, we just happened to spot a whole pile of boxes of all sizes outside the back door of one of the markets on our street? So we grabbed a few more and set to wrapping (with Emile's help, I should add). So that was the extent of our contribution to the Bazaar, aside from showing up at 9 am (awfully early for us these days) to deliver the boxes and then hanging around the table for an hour or so trying to look useful.
The Bazaar, itself, though, was a great success. Tables were sponsored by embassies of countries from China to Poland to Croatia to, well, the US. Each table was selling items unique to their country, and all of the money generated was contributed to the children's hospital here in Montenegro. The US table was hocking chocolate chips, peanut butter, Kraft mac & cheese, canned chili, Hannah Montana and Hot Wheels items, Old navy shirts (with the American flag on them) and a slew of books by American authors.
It was a great effort, but I've gotta say that after cruising around to see the goods being offered at the other tables, I was a little privately embarassed to realize that the best Christmas offering the Americans could make was processed foods (as opposed to Russia's smoked salmon, Slovenia's wine or Croatia's baked goods) and media-saturated school folders and t-shirts (as opposed to handmade weavings, CDs of traditional music, etc.). But then, I guess it was an accurate depiction of Christmas in the States.
And it WAS a good way to get into the holiday spirit. I originally thought that there would be no sign of Christmas here before we left to go back home since the Orthodox Christmas isn't until after the first of the year, but the mall was decorated, our favorite cafe, Masa, has a curtain of lights hanging in front of its huge front window, there's a Christmas tree in the main lobby of the building where I teach, and Alex and I noticed on our way to the American corner last night that there are already Christmas lights hanging from the streetlamps in the city center (and beyond).
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