India - Wedding shopping and other preparations (Part 4)

Hello and welcome to the 4th part of our trip to India. This is where it all starts to get good because we are almost wedding ready! The only thing left to do is to go shopping and get our clothes and get some things altered at the tailors.

With only a few days left till some of the bigger celebrations occur, I have been able to somewhat determine the order of things.

It seems that we missed the ring exchange ceremony. But "that's not too important", is what I have been told... I mean it is only the engagement event!

So here is what I can tell from the bottom up.

Arranged Marriages
This wedding is an arranged one, as most weddings are in India, is my understanding. 
This is a bit of a weird concept for me, coming from a western country and in a time where women have so many freedoms that we fought so hard for to then go and throw the choice of our life partner into the hands of other people for the sake of tradition and family ties. 

In the case of my friend she is a nurse so I can imagine that she studied hard to get her degree and then she also has Canadian residency that I know she worked very hard to get. But then to marry someone that you do not know, organised by someone else - It is a weird concept for me.

For my friend, with the help of modern technologies I know that the prospective couple have been in contact and communicating for a while. But they had never met physically in person until a month or so before the wedding.

The wedding itself was arranged about 2 years ago, so not like I thought, which was that they were arranged almost from birth. 
It is also good that at least the marriage was arranged and set for later in my friend's life so at least she had the chance to live her life a little before she had responsibilities and family duties thrust upon her. 

I realise that I may be making this sound bad or negative, and I don't know what it is like going through an arranged marriage (much to my mother's dismay, as she was certainly trying to arrange one for me) but my friend seems to be happy enough about everything as far as I can tell. Plus she and her husband seem to be really getting to know each other which is lovely!

Ok - moving on with other things, I just thought that I would talk about the arrangement as this is something that I was definitely not familiar with myself.

So lets get down to how everything went, the wedding ceremonies themselves are:

The exchanging of rings: This is the official engagement party

The bangle ceremony: This is essentially the "hens do"
Turmeric Ceremony: As far as I can tell this is a "cleansing" ceremony

Roka 1: The bride’s friends and family go to meet the groom's friends and family.
Roka 2: Then vice versa the groom's family come to visit the bride's house/family
Turmeric Ceremony: Another turmeric Ceremony after his family came to visit.

The wedding: This is the day that they go to the temple and do the vows followed by lots of photos and food.

The reception: This is the day after the wedding and is a giant party at night

In any case I had to have to 5 dresses for this wedding!
As I missed the exchanging of the rings and I was not allowed to wear any of my dresses to the bangle ceremony the dresses were for the other remaining ceremonies.

So let go to the part that we were up to for today in the blog sequence of events – The dress shopping.

I needed to get all the 5 dresses that were required for the events I mentioned above.
So that was on the agenda as well as handing out some wedding invitations. We also did a nice detour to let my friend’s younger sister's nursing college know that she would be absent a few days for the wedding ceremonies.

The day started late as they allowed us to sleep in till 9 am which was good as we needed it! At 9 am we received our morning wake up call (my friend knocked on the door) and we emerged to get a look at where we were exactly.

As we arrived the day before late at night time we had not seen any of the countryside at all, the most we could tell is that we were in a farmland area.

Well let me tell you that we were not disappointed!!

The countryside was beautiful! Amazing! Better than you see in the tourist brochures!

We were completely surrounded by wheat fields - it was tranquil and the air was cleaner than in the cities.

At the end of the road there was a massive Sikh temple that broke up the sky line, and even that was impressive! 

We also got to meet Riva (below), I think she was the only working dog/pet dog I saw in India. The rest were un-loved street dogs.

We also got to meet the 2 cows and 1 buffalo (below) that they use for milking - That buffalo was weird though, it was always staring at you but would never let you pat it! 

Below: This one is my favorite - This is Jessica, she is the baby of one of the cows and is kept separately, I eventually adopted her as my own (I will elaborate further later).  

Above: This is one of the farm hands, his entire job is to look after the cows. He has to cut the grass for them, clean their poop when they do that, and every now and again he walks the cows over to drink some water.

Below: It was cool to see that they had an old fashioned hand pump to get water up from the well. They did also have a normal water pump for drinking water and showers etc. but it was cool to see the old water pump.

Below: This is something that I eluded to in our Taj Mahal Blog. The afternoon of when we had been to the Taj there was a storm that seemed to have ripped throughout northern/central India. 
So when we arrived to the Punjab region there was also evidence of the storm, ie. fields flooded and crops flattened and destroyed.

Below: Here is a potato field that got completely decimated by the hail as you can see it is also flooded. I imagine it was a lot more flooded but the farmers seemed to have gone and dug massive holes on the side of their fields in an attempt to drain the water from the land and try to salvage the crops. 

Above: This is one of the holes the locals were digging in their fields to try to collect all the excess water - worked pretty well I reckon! The hole acts like a low pressure zone and all the water from across the field and in the soggy mud gravitates towards the holes. Helps stop the crops from rotting due to constant water soaking, and keeps the water in one spot. Maybe they can pump it out later? We didn't see what happened to these holes after, but unfortunately for the farmers it was too little too late the crops did not look like they were bouncing back.

Below: This is one of those wheat storage huts that we mentioned in the previous blog you can see it has started to collapse

After examining the surroundings it was time for a shower… If you can call it that (remember the bucket from out last blog).

My poor friend was worried that having an outdoor toilet and a shower in a bucket was going to be too much of a shock for me, but I relished the challenge and set off to have my 'shower'.

After that it was breakfast and we were off on adventures. Here are some of the things that we saw along the way:

Below: Did I forget to mention that a tractor is also a form of transport in India!

Below: Just driving down the road, oh look a herd of goats!

Below: This is a side street that Kyran took a photo of. It kind of depicts the quite relaxed lives they lead. You do your work, and then you sit around in the street and watch the world go by.

Below: This is a random pond that we came across. This first thing I noticed was that it was very polluted. However as we drove back past this pond later on we saw a bunch of women with metal rake-like contraptions on strings that they were throwing into the pond and pulling all the rubbish in. So that was the most positive thing that I saw happening with rubbish my entire trip in India!

Alrighty enough with the photos where are the stories?

As mentioned earlier, because the wedding celebrations were over the course of almost a week we needed to go and ask permission/tell the head teacher at my friend's sister's school that she would be absent during the celebration period. 

My friend's sister, who I will hence forth refer to as my sister (because we were essentially adopted now lol) is studying nursing at a local college. That was one of the first stops we made.

This "asking for permission to be away from class" was a funny thing for us. If it was my university I would have probably just sent an email and "There you are!". But that is not how it works in India. We arrived at the gate with sweets in hand. We had to be let in by the guard on duty and my sister had to account for us all to the guard as visitors to the school. 
Below is a photo of the college once we went through the gate, you can see the entire college is surrounded by tall walls!

Once we got to the college main building I was expecting that we would just sit in the waiting room until my sister and mum were summonsed to put their case forward. But actually we ended up being treated like royalty and were given a tour of the college. It was funny (and I will keep mentioning it all the way through our India blogs) because we were these rare white people so everyone came out to say hello and see us. We were even shown into a room where a class was being taught and introduced to the class. I came to refer to this effect/treatment as 'we were as rare as white rhinos'. 

So here are some photos from inside the nursing college:

Above and Below: This room is the birthing room with diagrams and pictures all over the walls.

Once we had been introduced to everyone and seen a few of their rooms it was time to set off on another adventure!
Actually we stopped off at a few houses to hand out invitations for the wedding in two days (that's how they do it in India) and each time we stopped, us white rhinos got out and said hello and got asked to stay at everyone's house. They all wanted to feed us or give us tea!!
They are all lovely people it was just a strange dynamic for Kyran and I.

With all the invitations that we had handed out, we had worked our way further from home and closer to where the dress shops were. 

We had to drop off some material at a local dress makers first because there was one mandatory outfit that we already knew we needed - a yellow traditional suit for me! 

Below: Here I am getting measured up for my suit that we will come by and pick up in 1-2 days. 

So that is 1 out of 5 dresses sorted - now to the bigger shops to buy more of them. 

Plot twist! Along the way the brothers decided that as Kyran is now a brother too that he also needs to dress up as one of the brothers of the bride in traditional clothes. 
So Now we had to buy some material for Kyran, plus he had to go buy some material for his turban (called a Pagri) that he also had to wear! And it had to be pink (to match the other boys)😂😂😂

Insert: I will tell the story of the dresses but full disclosure - the dresses and Kyran's suit happened over the course of three days -  we had to buy the clothes and then get them altered, and then try them on and get them altered again. There were tailors for the boys and tailors for me. In fact I had two tailors; one who was making my suit from scratch (the yellow one) and another that was assembling the suit that I will buy later on in this blog.

Ok so on with the stories. 
Below is a photo that Kyran took of an Indian Ladder

 Below: This is another brick-making set up that we came across on our travels

Below: An intersection in the middle of two market streets - look at that wiring set up!

Below: Oh look here is us in the middle of a market street. I believe that here we were going to the jewellers to inspect the 24 carat gold necklace that the bride receives from her family. It had some small imperfections so we were going to check that it was fixed.

Below: Dresses Finally! So this is how you go dress shopping in India!

You enter the shop (it is usually a long, narrow shop) and there is a long sofa/couch thing that you sit on. Then there is a long elevated table / platform thing that a shop attendant will present the options to you on. 

The exchange happens like so:
"Hi we are looking for a suit for a wedding. Not too heavy and maybe a dark colour" (all in Indian dialect of course)

Then the guy starts opening packages that his colleague is throwing at him which fits the description. There are no two suits the same so as they come out you start saying, "I like this colour" and "maybe more gold", "nah I don't like those pants". 

It was great to have mum to go shopping with because she was no-non-sense! The first few shops we went into and sat down in, they had thrown maybe 20 suits at us and none of them were to her liking, so she just got up and left! 😂😂😂



The second shop is where we acquired my first of the 4 dress that I still needed to buy (pictured above). After that mum wasn't impressed with any of the other shops so we went to the fancy one that my friend (the bride) had got her dress at in the main streets of Phagwara.

Then the whole thing started again, just fancier.
This shop had suits downstairs, dresses upstairs and it was decided that I only needed one dress and the rest could be suits of some description.
Here are some photos of trying on the dresses:

  Above and Below: This is the second of the four dresses that I ended up getting. 

Below Right: The third of the four dresses that I had to get. 
Below Left: It was all a bit of fun because, again we were the white rhinos and they all thought that everything looked good on me! You could look around the shop each time I walked out of the change room with another dress on and they would all be stopped and looking at you 😅😁😂

Sorry - It doesn't look as though I have a photo of of me trying the last dress that I bought so you will just have to wait for that blog to come out!

Well the day was certainly getting on, but we didn't have shoes yet so across the road we went!

Below: These are the traditional Punjabi Jutti. Kyran also got a pair but his feet were so hairy the photos disappeared whoops! (Joking, I just can't find them). 

Below: Literally as soon as we walked out of the shoe store we ran into the groom-to-be and his family doing their last minute shopping, so we quickly snapped a group photo before scattering off in our different directions

Well that is this blog starting to wind down again - here are a few after thought photos of things that we came across;

Below: These ladies have been out cutting what I have been told is fresh grass for the cows, and are now carrying it home.

 
Left: Here is a photo from inside the parking lot that we parked in to go shopping:
1. I was surprised that there was such a civilised parking lot
2. I was even more surprised at the amount of dust in the parking lot!

Well that is it from me for another blog. 

Kyran would you you like to add anything else before we get stuck into the wedding ceremonies in the next blog?

Well I personally thoroughly enjoyed going out on all the shopping adventures and seeing the nearby villages and towns while preparing for the wedding ceremonies. I think we saw and experienced lots of culture which we wouldn't have seen if we weren't in the wedding party. The dress shopping was funny to watch, because the salesmen are obviously keen to make a sale, so they desperately throw dresses at you and they have to unpack them from plastic wrap, and we ended up having a dozen or so dresses piled up with matching (or not lol) pants and shawls for each of them, then if we left the shop the salesmen (or their assistants?) would have to painstakingly pack them all up again. 

The shoe shopping was just as hilarious - the shoe salesman guys would be literally throwing shoes at you, then away into a pile if you didn't like them. The shop assistants would then have to go and clean up the pile and make the shoes all neat again and in their proper pairs. If a shoe didn't fit, they'd get these wooden inserts out with a screw jack to expand the shoe and try to widen it to see if that will help it fit you (and simulate loosening over time?). 

In the city area with the car park, there were beggars and street sellers everywhere - I even picked up a pair of fake Ray Ban sunglasses. 
Funny story, the sunglasses sales guy on the street first offered to sell some glasses to me and claimed they were polarized, and had this weird holographic test thingy to try to prove they were polarized. I'm a bit smarter than that, so I checked with my phone by viewing it and turning it sideways to see if the screen goes black which it should if the glasses were polarized. Turns out they were NOT! 
So he went digging and found some glasses which actually WERE polarized, then he tried to high-ball us at around 2,500 Rupees. That translates to about 50 Australian Dollars. We all shook our heads, saying "no way, that's way too much" - which of course it was way too much, for fake Ray Ban aviators. Then as we walked away, the sales guy desperately said to me "how much will you pay then?". I said "1000 rupees", but wasn't really interested anymore. The guy was like "argh, okay" then Mercedes jumped in and said "no way, 800 rupees or we are going!".  The guy finally accepted 800 (~$16 AUD) rupees, which was close to 75% off his original price! Cheeky bugger. Still, $16 for polarized glasses isn't too bad, fake or not!  

As we tried to get across the road from the sunglasses sales man to the car park to go home, we were accosted by some cute little street beggar kids. I couldn't help it, and gave a single 10 rupee coin (about 25c worth) to one of the kids. Well that was it, the horde of beggar kids must have a hive-mind or something, because the swarm descended upon us like it was an apocalypse. We made it to the car park and kids were popping up everywhere like mushrooms and begging for more coins. The oldest Indian brother fetched the car, while the car park security and admin guys on the lower floor at the entrance held back the tide of beggars for us. What a day!

Well thanks for reading and stay tuned for out next blog where the wedding ceremonies actually start.