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.
Day 6 Event 1: Hyderabad Tourism
We'd had quite a bit of tourism in our last trip to India and this trip was focused on the wedding, not tourism, but we had scheduled one day of tourism towards the end of the trip. The tour was set up by some friends of ours who were also attending the wedding and we picked up a few more people through speaking to other wedding guests. The theme of the tour of Hyderabad was arts and crafts and the first stop was a weaving studio. The studio trained widowed women (who apparently have a really tough time getting work) as weavers, which is enough to make a living on. Proceeds from the shop also support a nearby school where the children of the women working there go.
We were told they get through about 2 inches a day, and it is an entirely manual process. The looms looked a bit ramshackle but apparently served the purpose.
We were also told that a master weaver did the configuration and set up for the patterns - we thought they should teach that too.
The group did a fair bit of shopping at the attached shop. We got some interesting orange fabric for future craft projects and some scarves as presents for the rest of the faculty when we got back - nothing actually made on these looms as that fabric was extremely expensive.
Our next stop was a downtown bazaar that was a hub around which most of the remaining stops focused - this picture does not do justice to the quantity of things for sale or the bustle of the place. A few members of the group bought some fruit.
This structure (apparently called the Charminar) is sort of the central hub of the city of Hyderabad - their famous landmark building. The scaffolding is for cleaning.
We mostly got everyone into the shot
We were getting peckish and stopped into a bakery cafe recommended by the guide. They were selling all manner of cookies and confections by the pound - individual portions were mostly about three or four cents per.
One of the display cases
We got something of a sampler platter - the pastries in the middle were savory with vegetables and very tasty and pretty much all of the cookies were good - if one person didn't favor a specific one, someone else preferred it. I'm pretty sure all of this cost about $1.00 (and I think we'd already eaten some of the cookies before remembering to take a picture).
The next stop was a traditional embroidery shop - these gentlemen are carefully sewing approximately 1 gajillion individual decorative components onto a piece of fabric. It sounded like they were doing a pretty high-end product and it would take that team more than a week to finish, even with multiple people working on the same piece.
On the brown cloth are the raw pieces, and a finished part of the design can be seen under his hand. The pieces are extremely small.
One member of our group wanted some embroidered pieces - sort of rolls of trim that could be attached to other things, and we spent a long time doing the bargaining game for them, then had trouble getting their card reader to work so she could actually buy them. I think we ended up using someone else's credit card.
The final stop was a pearl sorting and processing plant. Hyderabad is nowhere near the ocean, but apparently a couple hundred years ago they were known as a gem market and for processing other gems - so the local lord decided they should add pearls to their market and imported number of craftspeople who specialized in pearls. Down the road, the region still handles vast quantities of them - some of the brands they work for are definitely global names in pearls and with the number of pearls in the building I was surprised there weren't armed guards in evidence. They would happily let you run your hands through some of the piles and they were very enthusiastic about the tour.
This guy's job is to carefully drill a hole through the center of the pearls - I am sure they don't run out of work for him very often.
They went through the steps to process the pearls pretty extensively, and insisted on pictures at multiple stages - the bottles we're holding are either for bleaching or softening the pearls - I forget - both steps were part of the overall process.
This kind of tour wouldn't be complete without a stop in the attached shop - in this case it was several blocks away in a much more prominent and fancy shop - several members of the group made purchases and we had our Hindi-speaking friend available to put the finishing touches on the negotiations. All the items at least had listed prices when you started so you knew how much of a discount you were getting off the quoted rate. We got a snazzy necklace for Ana - small black pearls (the color is artificial or else it would have cost the earth, but the pearls are real) laid out in a swooping v-shape - should be practical for work and play. Some items in that shop I am confident many people would assume as fake should they see them firsthand, just on the size and quantity of pearls used.
Heading back to the bus to return to the Club, we crossed this terrifying intersection mostly by the force of the guide's will - we formed a wedge and waded into the traffic, but the traffic on the whole was not impressed. Nobody died, but there were moments where that outcome did not seem inevitable.
We have one more event to show off - the final, formal wedding reception, before we got back on the plane and headed home to grade exams before grades were due from the school. So we'll pick up next time in the evening for the wedding reception proper.
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