wedding bells

Last Saturday we were happy to finally have a quiet evening without any company, when our neighbors stopped by. They came bearing an invitation to a wedding. Upon opening the invitation we learned that we've never actually met the bride or the groom, but it's our neighbors cousin.
Now 1st of all, let me just say that we love it when neighbors stop by…they are always welcome. But this particular night we were just looking forward to some peace and quiet without anyone extra…seems like our door has not been shut for the past two weeks. There are constantly people here.
2nd, we don't really know these neighbors very well, and so it seemed a little strange that we would be invited to her cousin's wedding. Guess it's just cultural though. I don't think I'd want a bunch of people I didn't know at my wedding, but in India it seems to just be the more the merrier. I think our whole street was invited.

So anyways, we were told we were invited, and told that we needed to wear saris. We were also told that the wedding started at 7:30, but we should arrive late, because everyone does, and that it ended "when the stars disappear and the sun comes up". An all night wedding…crazy.
So that being said, Mel and I had 3 days to come up with saris that neither of us owned. We went to Dehradun on Sunday to try and find some. Unfortunately, because it was a Sunday, the main sari shops were closed. Ravi told us that it was probably too late to buy them anyway, because there wasn't enough time for them to be made. So we resorted to finding really fancy kurtas instead. Long story short, I found one, Mel didn't. So she decided to just borrow a sari from our good friend Richa. She and I went to go pick it up the next night. After handing it to Mel, Richa said that the blouse had been taken in because Ravi had worn it last and so we might need to undo some of the stitching on the inside. Side note- for those of you who have never seen Ravi, she's tiny. In everyway.
Upon returning home, Mel tried on the blouse…let's just say it definitely needed to be taken back out. We had a good laugh. Not much breathing room.

The next day when our sweet helper Bimla was here, we had her show us how to put it on so that we could hopefully successfully get Mel dressed for the wedding later that night.
For starters, when Bimla walked in the room she started laughing so hard she was crying. I had helped Mel fasten the blouse, and apparently we did it backwards :) We had quite the bonding time with Bimla as she helped us learn how to wrap a Sari. It was pretty funny.

Apparently we didn't learn it very well, because as we were trying to put it back on her around 8:00, it didn't work nearly as well as we were hoping. After about 5 or 6 tries, she headed down our street to our other neighbors, who also happened to be invited to the wedding as well.

By the time the getting ready was dealt with, and Micah & Levi were settled in with Uncle Isaac and Aunt Ravi, we got to the wedding about 8:45. We walked into the venue and there were masses of people EVERYWHERE. It was craziness. When I had asked our neighbor how many people there would be, he told us that 3-4 thousand were invited. I thought that his English was just a little bit mixed up and he meant 3-4 hundred. Nope. Pretty sure he said what he meant. There were at least 2 thousand people milling about. I've never seen anything like it. It was extremely colorful, lively, lots of loud music, dancing, and there was more food then you can imagine. Everyone was dressed fancy, wandering around eating and having a good time. I'm sure we stuck out like a sore thumb, (people were most def staring) but we did fit in just fine as far as dress goes. After about 20 min we found our neighbor Massood, and his family and hung out with them. Aside from the family that initially invited us, they were some of the only people we knew in the entire place. We wandered around eating and meeting people for about an hour and then Masood suggested we go upstairs to the tent to eat dinner. We thought we'd just eaten dinner…he informed us that was just the refreshments. Haha. So we walked upstairs to many, many more people, and much, much more food. The eating was pretty funny, because even though were was tons, and tons of food, and by no means was it going to run out any time soon, you had to be extremely pushy to even get a plate. And then push your way through the food. People were pushing, shoving and elbowing. The males didn't care less that you were a female and much smaller then them, and the fact that you were in "line" went out the window. The older woman were the worst though, which I found pretty hysterical.
We stuck around till almost 11:00 and then decided since it didn't look like anything but eating was happening even remotely soon, we should head home to the boys. As we were driving back up our street, we saw our neighbor, the bride, and a bunch of other girls, just leaving the house. The wedding started at 7:30, it's now 11:00, and the bride is just leaving. Clearly we're living in another culture! It was fun to see/meet/congratulate the bride up close and personal though. Man alive, was she decked out. She looked beautiful.

So anyway, that was our first Hindu, Indian wedding experience. By the end of the night I was thankful I hadn't ended up wearing a Sari. Mel was worried the whole night that it was going to fall off, and it looked cold and hard to walk in. I'll buy and wear one eventually because you just can't live in India for a year and not wear a Sari at least once, but I'm glad it didn't happen to be on that very chilly night :)
It was neat to experience something so cultural like a wedding. Fun to try new traditional foods, and just watch people. Next time maybe we'll actually stay through the ceremony.