Sense and Simplicity: Our Evening with the International Models

I never in my wildest dreams thought I would attend my first fashion show while I was in Bangladesh. Yep, you read that right - recently we went to a fashion show at a fancy hotel in Dhaka. Kim and I were asked by the Centre for Rehabilitation of the Paralysed (CRP) to attend a charity reception as the money was being raised for CRP and Miss Canada was going to be there. And since Kim and I are so closely associated with both Miss Canada and international models we were selected to attend the posh event. All I can say is that it was the most surreal evening of my life!

Late Friday afternoon Kim and I got dressed in our finest (which for me meant my slightly dirty linen pants and a navy and beige blouse) and met at the gate of CRP with one of the Bangali Speech teachers who was going to attend with us. It took two hours of bumpy, hot, sweaty driving to get to the hotel. The drive was through all the poverty and crowds and noise that make up life for most of the people here in Bangladesh.

The event was about an hour and a half late starting so I had plenty of time to people watch - very interesting as you can imagine. The evening began with a somewhat dubious comedian who liked to berate the audiance for not laughing - an interesting technique! Then we watched the CRP video and finally saw the fashion show.

The fashion show was a mix of western clothing - some of which were a tad on the skimpy side shall we say - and Bangladeshi clothing. The Bangladeshi clothing were lovely, all decorated with jewels and fine material. I do always wonder why models, no matter where they are from, insist on glowering at the audience.

We left at the break as it was already 10:30 and we had a long drive to get back to CRP. On the way home we had to stop at a gas station to have the heat indicator on the jeep looked at. When we stopped our driver asked us to please sit in the plastic lawn chairs beside the jeep. It struck Kim and I as rather hilarious to be sitting in the middle of a gas station at 12:30 at night surrounded by buses. I referred to the plastic lawn chairs as our princess chairs (you can see me sitting on my princess chair in the photo below).