Like just about anybody in the west, I've spent a good amount of time in Ikea. As a student in Canada they furnished my student room, and since then I've accumulated dozens of things. I guess it isn't my favorite furniture, and it tends towards the cheaply made side, but it is relatively easy, and neither outrageously ugly nor outrageously expensive like so much of what is available in Germany (in my humble opinion). A necessary evil: if I had more money, time, inclination, I would go elsewhere, but alas, I don't.
It surprised me a little, then, to find out that there is something of a craze in the former Yugoslavia for Ikea furniture. People in Novi Sad, for instance, will drive to Hungary to place orders and then usually charge some kind of premium for the service. And it seems the second hand stuff sells like wildfire, and at a hefty price. And it isn't just furniture. Much as I hate to admit it, before our last visit to Serbia, we bought a lot of the kind of Ikea stuff that I normally avoid on the basis that it is just them flogging us things we don't need: rucksacks, cookies, little plastic gizmos, pen holders, Swedish vodka (for chrissakes). We did this for presents, which by and large were greatly appreciated as something good. I mean Ikea - super je.
There are a lot of other things like this in Serbia: Addidas is a fashion label, not a sport shoe-maker; Nescafe is a luxury, not a convenience - they even sell it in Duty-Free in Belgrade Airport. I also found it rather strange during a visit of my mother in law they way she would handle some of my things. For example, some Ikea 50 cent napkins, bought in a hurry to accommodate guests, were hand-washed, ironed and put carefully away whereas my precious hand-made, very expensive, one-of-a-kind, Provencal napkins bought during a holiday some years ago were used to clean paint brushes. Ditto cheap 1 Euro glasses were hand-washed and dried, while 25 pound apiece, lead-crystal glasses from Harrod's were used to hold paint-thinner (you couldn't see the Ikea label on the latter).
I'm not trying to have a go at the taste of people in Serbia, but rather to point out that one values things for different reasons. It is, I must admit, quaint in a kind of genteel way to see how cheap-as-chips things in the west are so covetted in former communist countries. I always remember with a smile the first post-Glasnost Russians (scientists, lawyers, doctors, whoever) arriving in the west in the early nineties, and how within days they would all being decked out in white trainers and acid-washed Levi's circa 1984.
What is ironic to me, however, is that it was only in Serbia that I started to appreciate the worth of things - well made things, long-lasting things. At least when I started going there people bought things to last, and checked out the material and the stitching. This was in contrast to my typically western Gap/Zara/Ikea approach which consists of buying a lot of cheap clothes and renewing them every year when they wear out. To see people being converted into this label-only, it-isn't-cheap-if-I-see-a-name kind of culture is a bit sad.
Or maybe I'm just a sentimental old fart. Oh, to hell with it, buy and enjoy what you like!
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Once, on some theory design class (I'm a designer), professor said that some things have value somewhere, but somewhere else nobody thinks about them. The example was: 2 brothers, 1 living in E. Germany, another in W. Germany. The 1st brother drives a Trabant and dreams about driving a Moskvitch; other brother drives a Golf and dreams about driving a BMW. Or look at "jade". For Chinese, it's prescious, important, etc. rock, over here, its just a nice rock, nobody would give lots for it. When Europeans went in Americas for the first time, they wanted gold, asked for it and got it because it wasn't that important for Indians. Examples are everywhere. ;)
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