We planned to visit a famous palace on Sunday, but after the long and hectic day we had Saturday, neither of us felt like waking up early to brave the tourist stuff again in the heat. When we woke up they were setting up for a lavish Indian wedding outside, and we watched them prepping from the restaurant downstairs where we had brunch. There were tons of people dressed up in the hotel and some of the guys were wearing Punjabi suits and these shoes with long, curled up ends (kind of like the shoes Aladdin wears!). I later found out they’re called mojaris. We asked one of the hotel employees and he told us 8,000 people would be at the hotel for the wedding; we assumed this included all of the randoms who were outside gawking and not actually invited. Later another employee told us there were only 1,000 actual guests. We told him how a wedding with 200 guests was considered a large wedding in the States and he laughed and looked really shocked.
After brunch we headed out to a mall called the Inorbit Mall. It’s much closer to the hotel than the one we visited on Saturday, and is apparently the biggest mall in Southern India. The mall is about four stories high and has a lot of American stores, but more Indian ones than the other mall, which was nice. We went to Shopper’s Stop to look for some Indian clothes for me. I really wanted to get a sari, but never realized that most are custom made (you just buy the fabric and take it to a tailor). They don’t have on-site tailoring at the department stores, which seems odd. I opted not to buy the fabric since I had no idea where to find a tailor and getting around for me is difficult during the week w/out a cell phone. I am smacking myself for not buying the fabric, because I actually NEED to buy a sari now because we were invited to a wedding for T’s coworker next week!! Very excited.
Anyway, I tried on a bunch of kurtas (tunics) and salwar kameez (long tunics with matching pants) at Shopper's Stop and at another department store called Lifestyle, and ended up buying a kurta at Shopper's Stop and then two tops that were in the equivalent of the “junior’s section” – they have cool embroidery and details on them but they’re not exactly traditional Indian. The sizes here run VERY small and the head/arm holes are extremely small on everything compared to American garments. I actually got stuck in a kurta in the dressing room (which is called a “trial room” here) and was afraid I would rip it because I couldn’t get it off! Of course I couldn’t ask T to come in and help me since it was a women’s trial room, and after a minute or so I started to freak out. Luckily, I was able to get it off without incident after a while!
We browsed around the mall some more and went to a very cool store called Fab India. We bought some handmade bangle bracelets for some friends/family at home, and a beautiful handmade jewelry box type thing with little drawers. Everything was really cheap and the company supports local craftspeople, so I like that it gives back to the deserving people in India.
Random sighting: they have a guy who operates a motorized stuffed camel on wheels and kids can go for rides on it. The guy climbs on the camel with the kid and the mom walks behind it while they ride around the mall!
After shopping we went back to the hotel (it was around 5pm) and they were STILL setting up for the wedding, even though they had been at it all day. Someone told us that there were actually two weddings going on that day – one was in the convention center and the other one was outside. I’m not sure which one was which, but one was for a film star and the other one was for the son of some ridiculously wealthy concrete company owner. They had security checks at every door with metal detectors, guards and people checking the guest list, so there was no chance of being a wedding crasher.
We hung out in the room for a while and then went out to dinner at a restaurant called Paradise, which is close to the hotel. It took forever to get there with all of the traffic from the wedding. There were people lined up along the road watching the procession, which was happening just as we left. All of the guests were carrying what looked like torches and this awesome (and really loud) drum music was playing as they walked from the back of the hotel property across to the gardens where the reception was set up. I took a video but we were far away, and it was so dark that it didn’t turn out.
We sat outside at Paradise since they didn’t have any inside tables. This freaked me out a little b/c of the bugs, but they had fans going everywhere so it wasn’t really possible for them to land at least. They also have a landscaped area with a rock waterfall so it was a nice atmosphere. We shared chicken biryani, which is a Hyderabadi specialty and really good. We also had naan (I’ve had this in the States – it’s a type of bread) and butter chicken. The butter chicken didn’t really taste buttery at all, it’s in a reddish sauce and is fairly spicy, but tasty. The servers were really nice and since everything was family style they kept coming over and putting more food on our plates!
It took about four times as long as it should to get home, since the traffic from the wedding was still really heavy. Our driver decided to bypass this and drive on the shoulder (dirt) and we almost hit a goat, or maybe it was a dog. Dark so hard to tell. We watched the wedding going on from our window and they were shooting fireworks off all night until like 1-2 am. No dancing, just people standing around talking and eating. I guess the dancing part happened earlier in the day? We watched Spider Man 3 on one of the decent movie channels here and called it a night, but it was really hard to sleep between the fireworks and the music!
Today's Bollywood video:
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