Our first Indian wedding!

Rein checking in -

"Our last Sunday, before our ten day meditation retreat, we witnessed our first fully fledged Indian wedding. A teacher of one of our housemates, Clo, who studies jewellery design here in India, was getting married in Mysore. The invite was for Clo and friends, so practically the whole house decided to make a day trip out of it.

Mysore is the old capital of the kingdom of the royal Wodiyar Maharaja family and well worth a visit in its own right because of its many historical buildings, most notably the Mysore Palace, which was built by the family as their main residence in the late 19th century. We'd been wanting to visit it so thought this would be good opportunity.

The wedding would start at 10:50 (exactly!) so we decided to play it safe and leave at 7:30 am to allow for sufficient time to bridge the 150 km. The car and driver arrived and we set off in good spirits for a nice day out. Those spirits slowly but steadily dissipated however, when after 90 minutes we still hadn't left the city... Finally we made it to the Mysore highway by 9:30 and still had about 100 k. to go.

The two girls (Clo and Gé) had decided to do the trip by scooter; our scooter which at best could just be trusted to get us from our home to work and back which is no more than 6 k. So we were very concerned if they would make it at all... They had left at dawn and sure enough about halfway between Bangalore and Mysore we passed them on the highway going strong. We decided to stop at a chai stall a few k.'s further to wait for them and check how they were doing. We waited and waited and when they didn't show up we decided to turn around and head back to see what happened to them. And sure enough we found them at a road side mechanic with a broken down scooter. They assured us they would be fine and urged us to keep going and try to make it to the wedding in time.

Finally, after 4 hours, travelling with four tall Europeans and driver in a tiny Tata Indica, we rolled into Mysore just in time to witness the end of the wedding ceremony, but, thankfully, just in time for the lunch.

While Indian weddings may appeal to our imagination of being very festive affairs with song and dance, they are in fact quite boring and formal. The bride and groom sit on a stage for hours at an end, undergoing all kind of formalities, which are witnessed by about a 1,000 guests sitting in row after row in a huge community hall. We went up onto the stage to pay our respects to the couple and then went down into the cellar of the building for a typical Indian lunch, which is served on long, long tables with the guests sitting on one side and servers passing by on the other side with huge containers of delicacies which they stoically heap onto the banana leaves in front of each guest. It's a very functional affair, with people focussing on eating and hardly any talking. When guests have barely finished their last mouthful, they are hastily ushered out of the dining area to make place for the next wave of a few hundred diners.

Waiting in line to pay our respect

Ladies wearing their finest saris

The happy couple undergoing the 216th ritual after sitting on stage for the past 2,5 hours! 

The proud parents of the bride who are paying for the whole thing
(accounting for the joyful expressions on their faces) !

Lunch being served in the underground dining hall!

Mysore Palace

So after having spent four hours on the road, we spent a total of barely an hour at the wedding and decided to head to the Mysore palace for a quick sighting. When we arrived there we found out that roughly half the population of Southern Karnataka had had the same idea, so we dutifully lined up with the thousands of fellow visitors and step-by-step followed the strictly demarcated path through the viewing halls of the otherwise quite impressive edifice.

We hit the road again and finally got back home early evening. A trip that in Europe would take no more than an hour and a half had taken us here over 4 hours at an average speed of 30 k/hr, curled up in the back seat of a car the size of a mini cooper... Exhausted and aching with pains all over our bodies, Simon and I fell flat on our bed and dozed off, vowing that this would be our last Indian road trip"

- Rein checking out