Thursday, March 1, 2018

Wedding Trip to India 2017, Part 1

Regular readers of our now quite irregularly appearing blog will may remember we took a trip to India in December of 2015 and wrote an epic 19 part series of blog posts about it - this is not that trip. This is another trip, also to India, but this time mostly for a wedding instead of tourism.

As usual, the photos that we took can be found on Flickr. Some of the photos used in this blog post were taken by friends of ours or the wedding photographers and don't appear on Flickr. Those will be noted with credit when used.

The wedding was of good friends of ours, one of whom Lee was close with and had adventures with in college, and who also worked on a term project team whose other members were us. He was also notable for 'interviewing' Ana for the position of dating Lee (mostly for his own edification I think, I didn't ask him and we were already dating) and being a bit surprised that a feature-function matrix had under-girded her decision making there. The bride-to-be we'd met more recently but she's also a smashing human being and we're very happy for them both.

Day 0:
This being in India and an Indian wedding, the travel and festivities were not a short affair, but the wedding took place juuuust between the end of courses for the semester and final grades being due, so we were lucky to be able to fly out and attend. For the flight out we only had two legs, one to Heathrow (one of Raleigh's 2 international flights per day!) and then on to Delhi. We ran into another friend from college waiting for the flight to Delhi, so the meeting up and hanging out began before we even got to India.

And of course like the nerds / engineering faculty that we are, we took pictures in the airport of this complex truss being all 'hey that's a real-life example of a 3D statics problem'

Day 1:
Learning from the overfull travel and tourism plans of the previous trip, we had given ourselves a much lighter schedule and the first day we had scheduled...absolutely nothing. The hotel was a step up from most of the places we'd stayed on the previous trip and it being the end of the semester for us and having spent ~30 hours in transit, we just spent the day recovering. In the evening we went out for dinner with most of the other not-from-India / foreign friends coming in for the wedding. The hotel and wedding venue were selected for being very close to where the bride's family lived and therefore we got an outstanding restaurant recommendation (restaurant was called Mahabelly, if you're in the area). 

It also turns out that the friends close enough to the couple to fly halfway around the world to be at their wedding were all fun and interesting people. The bride and groom were usually busy with, you know, getting married, so it was great to have all these other people (some we already knew, many new faces) to go through the experience with.

All this was a much better idea than going out and touring, especially since we'd seen most of the big sites of Delhi the last time we were in town. We were also very glad to discover that the horrendous air quality we were anticipating based on the news had largely passed - we checked and air quality, while not good, was at something like a 2 year best, and it was actually better than the last time we were in Delhi in our opinion. On the other hand, there was a large group of dogs outside the hotel having loud discussions with each other at night, but earplugs substantially mitigated this concern.

Day 2:
Coming into the sequence of wedding events, we'd been given a schedule, and we quickly learned two things about it: 1) count on starting later than the scheduled time and 2) if something is marked 'close family only' then all the foreigners are welcome, so we went to pretty much everything. The next day was an event for the bride's side that was supposed to be only for women, but instructions on the scene said dudes might as well show up too. This event was called a mehendi and it boils down to a party where the bride gets her henna done. It was in the morning, within walking distance of our hotel on the roof of another hotel, and there was a certain amount of snacks, music, and dancing but mostly it was hanging out while the work got done. Most of the pictures below were taken by our new friend Liz.

Venue - rooftop done up for a party

Bride to be before starting

They applied henna on her for ~3 hours, had to move that couch with her on it to keep her out of the sun

Final product was both hands and arms to the elbow and feet and legs to the knee

To get good color on the henna you can't move and smear it so they had snacks to keep people busy while it dried. Also, the longer you leave it on the darker it is, and the darker it is the more the groom is supposed to love the bride. So you leave it on for as long as possible.

Some friends and family did some dances to entertain the bride, more or less selected and run by her childhood friends

After a semester of teaching, it was lovely to not be the center of any kind of attention and not have anyone requiring me to do anything. The singer that came in was peeved that not everyone was participating in some dances, but doing mostly nothing was absolutely my speed at that time.

As the bride's henna was finished, smaller applications were available for any others that wanted it - Ana had some done and then had to hold her hands out for an hour or so while it dried. 

After the mehendi, we had a few hours before dinner and very productively napped. 

Dinner was held at the local family temple (again walking distance to the hotel), and it was a big buffet-style affair. We were there mostly on-time, which is to say, early, so we got to make an early run through the buffet line and get a table nice and close to it. These pictures are also from Liz, who took a lot of pictures and then organized them really well so it is easy to find ones from different events. Thanks, Liz!

This is maybe 2/3rds of the line - way too many things to be able to try them all

All the bride's-side-hosted events were vegetarian, but since it is Indian food for Indian people (not the sort of sad wan stuff many tourist-focused places in India serve, you could generally do pretty well if you chose your courses wisely.

Ana caved to the pressure of a family member carrying around 'pan', which to my understanding is mostly green (uncured) tobacco with a few other things in it masquerading as a digestif. I warned her (I'd been tricked by this the last time in India) but she ate it anyway and kept it down without looking like she was suffering too much. 

I'm going to end the first installment here, since the next day was the actual wedding, after several additional preliminary events.

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