I. Geno and I were traveling by rickshaw and were passed by a motorcycle. Being passed by a motorcycle isn’t unusual, but being passed by a motorcycle with a 5 year-old standing up on the back seat is. His father was actually driving, but this kid was standing up on the back, no helmet, waving to the passing cars. Yes, waving to cars – meaning he wasn’t holding on to anything. One hand was gently placed on his fathers back and the other hand was giving a heart wave to everyone they passed.

II. Another rickshaw ride – there was a busy section of road (well all sections of road are busy in Delhi) and standing in the middle is an old man, smoking a cigar, directing traffic. He certainly wasn’t the traffic police, but there he was – pointing to random cars and directing them which way to go. No vehicles were actually heeding his advice, but no one seemed shocked by an old man standing in the middle of a busy road trying to direct traffic.

III. We were driving to Agra and through an intersection rumbles a large truck. Well, it would have been a large truck if there was more than just a frame to the truck. All that drove by was a metal frame, engine, wheels and the driver up high where the cab would normally be. The driver had a seat and a steering wheel and nothing else – no covering, he was out in the open. It was like a Flintstones truck. I thought this was strange until coming back from Rajasthan I saw about 20 more of these frame trucks. I have no idea what they do, because none of them were carrying anything. Maybe they are driving them to the next assembly location.

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The scandalous wedding dancers – must have for any wedding.

The happy couple.

I’m practicing my awkward white-boy dance moves.

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I only wish I could have worn the MC Hammer pants as well….

Balancing act

Geno and I trying to ignore Kinger’s ramblings

The actual wedding ceremony

More of the first evening’s festivities

The first evening’s entertainment

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After the bar, Rob and I went back to Deeps place for a bit of Xbox360. It was pretty late so we just crashed there for the evening. The next morning we caught a rickshaw back to Josh’s place. Rob (who had yet to see any Delhi sights) and I made plans to head down to Old Delhi for the afternoon – someplace I didn’t really have a chance to experience yet either.

Rob and I took a rickshaw to Connaught Place and caught the Metro from there to Old Delhi. The Delhi Metro was a big surprise. It is the nicest Metro I have ever been in. The stations are large and immaculate. The trains are clean. It’s nicer than London and Washington DC – both quite nice Metros. Then you come out of the Metro into old Delhi and it’s like you hit some ripple in the space-time continuum that sent you into an alternate universe where everything was filthy and falling apart. Then you look back behind you and see the immaculate Metro station is still there and you realize that this is the real thing. Walking around Old Delhi is experiencing the really poor part of the city. It was interesting to walk around for a while – but I don’t really need to go back any time soon.

We took the Metro back to Connaught Place and found a McDonalds (with a bathroom) where Rob was able to take care of his (still present) sickness. Connaught place is rife with shops and stores. There is also an underground market we visited so Rob could buy some souvenirs to bring home with him. I bought a bag since my new collection of suits were not going to fit in the one carry-on bag I brought with me.

After shopping we headed back to Sehgal Bros. to pick up my finished suits, shirts and pick out a few ties to go with them. Then it was back to Josh’s place where a few of us played cards for a few rupees each until early morning. We played with Josh’s cousin who was heading back to Bombay the next day via train. We asked him if it was far and he replied – “no not far, only 17 hours.” 17 hours on a train sounds like a living hell to me, but I guess some Indians are used to it.

On Monday I went back to Connaught Place to blow the last of my Indian rupees since I was leaving early the next morning (at 2am). I bought a pair of cufflinks to go with two of my shirts that I had tailored with a French cuff. I returned to Josh’s place late that afternoon and ended up joining Liz for a drive down to Rajasthan before I left.

They received a night at a palace-turned-hotel just over the Rajasthan border and I tagged along with them to see the place before their driver dropped me off at the airport on the way home. The hotel was the Neemrana Fort-Palace Hotel. You would never know a luxury hotel existed in the area this hotel was situated. To get to it, you had to drive down a crappy dirt road, through a dumpy village, and around some sharp, unmarked turns and up the side of a hill. However, once you finally get to it, the hotel is quite amazing. There are random walkways everywhere throughout the hotel so it’s quite easy to get lost. It’s almost like there are hidden passages to get to different places. Each room has something unique about it – Liz and Josh’s room had a private balcony area over looking the village and countryside. We all had the buffet dinner at the hotel before Tapan (the driver) and I headed back to Delhi. Obviously, despite it’s strange location, this hotel was well known as everyone in the buffet room was American or British.

I made it back to the airport without any problems and left only an hour late from Delhi (I was getting used to the whole ‘in India everything starts late’ thing finally). I was a bit worried because now I only had a 1 hour layover in Moscow, but it turned out to be no problem and I made it back to Sofia without incident. Even my bags made it as well!

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Josh had made reservations at the Hilton in Agra – of course we didn’t know this until we got there. Most of the week’s information was on a “need to know” basis. I rarely knew what was going on more than about 12 hours or less in advance – even the wedding events. And, it seemed to me, this was because no one knew what was going on with anything until about 12 hours before any event. Once we arrived at the Hilton there was some controversy because our whole group was given the Indian rate, but now we showed up with a bunch of white people who were expected to pay more than double. One of Josh’s friends worked at another Hilton in India and was able to negotiate us back down to the Indian rate $40 (as opposed to $99 for other whiteys). The hotel was nice, but the pool was closed for renovation which sucked. After a quick nap we headed to another hotel – the nicest in Agra ($600/night) – for dinner. We just ordered a bunch of dishes and shared them around the table. After dinner we spent a few minutes admiring the beautiful hotel grounds before heading back to our (now not so illustrious) Hilton. We made plans to meet at the hotel lobby at 8:30am sharp to start our tour of the Taj Majal. As usual, the white people were up at 8:30am but no Indians were to be found. We all took our time eating the free breakfast buffet – still without any of the Indians appearing. Eventually we found out through Liz that Josh had hired someone to give us a tour (this was obviously need-to-know for us only about 3 minutes before we left). The white people all left for the tour while the Indians slept.

Because of pollution concerns, no gas-burning vehicles are allowed near the Taj Majal. This being the case, we pulled into a parking lot away from the Taj and took an electric bus to the Taj entrance. As soon as we arrived in the parking lot and left our van we were accosted by droves of Indians selling various souvenirs of the cheap, crappy variety. The electric bus dropped us off at the one of the entrances to the Taj Majal where we went through a metal detector and were frisked before entering. The Taj Majal is actually part of a relatively large complex consisting of multiple buildings besides just the famous white Taj Majal mausoleum. Our tour guide gave us a good history of the Taj (which you can read about here) and took some pictures of us in front of the building. On the white stone of the Taj itself you are not allowed to wear shoes so we all donned booties to cover our shoes. We wandered around for a bit and took some more pictures. Although there were a lot of tourists there, it didn’t really seem that crowded because the complex was so big. We had no wait to get inside the dome and walk around the tomb.

Next we stopped at a tourist shop where we saw how Indian rugs were woven (and they tried to sell us some). The store also had a couple floors of various clothes and trinkets. The girls bought some stuff, but I had already spent my allotted India budget on suits.

After the store we went a few kilometers up to Agra Fort. The fort was a couple km upriver (downriver?) from the Taj so provided some good views from afar in addition to being an impressive site itself. We were limited in time so we flew through the expansive fort pretty quickly.

We got back to the Hilton early afternoon and we all got back in the vans for the trip back to Delhi. At this point Scott, Michelle and Geno split off from the rest of us to head to Jaipur – another well known town. I needed to head back to Delhi mainly because I needed to pick up my suits the next day as the store was not open on Monday (and I was leaving at 2am Tuesday morning). This was fine as one of Josh’s undergrad friends, Robert, had yet to see any of Delhi (he didn’t arrive until after our Delhi tour) so I said I’d poke around the city with him.

On the way back we stopped at a roadside McDonalds. The McDonalds was actually on the opposite side of a divided highway, but our driver didn’t seem to have too much trouble going down a ways to find a U-turn point and driving on the wrong side of the highway to get back to the McDonalds. I hate to say it, but McDonalds in India are really good! Since cows in India are sacred, McDonalds don’t serve any beef. However, they have a great Paneer Salsa Wrap, a great Veggie burger and several other tasty vegetarian dishes. I would live to see some of those dishes outside of India rather than the same burger fare that has existed forever. Some of the other guys were still sick from the reception two nights previous and had problems eating, but I had no problems at all chowing down both my food and their leftovers.

After another 5 ½ hour drive back we finally made it back to Josh’s place just as the sun was setting (which happens pretty early in Delhi – 7pm or so).

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After our visit with Deep, Geno and I headed back to Sehgal Bros. to get our second suit fitting. They had the suits loosely stitched up to ensure all the measurements were correct. Both of us made a couple adjustments and we were quickly on our way back to Josh’s place for day 3 of the wedding – taking place that evening.

Day 3 consisted of a large reception at another very nice Delhi hotel. The purpose of this part of the wedding was to invite everyone who had come to the previous events plus some. Parent’s business colleagues and others not as close to the family would be invited to this event. The event officially started at 7:30pm. At 7:30pm all the white people were there. No Indians showed up until around 8pm and Josh and Liz didn’t show until around 8:30pm. Indians like to joke that India is on IST, or India Stretch Time – meaning everything is going to late all the time. We white people never really caught on to this concept. Very often we found ourselves at major events, at the designated place and time … all by ourselves. It started to be a running joke.

Josh’s cousin is a producer in Bollywood and brought with him some dancers the reception. The dancers were scantily dressed, did some rather erotic dances, and I think almost gave Josh’s parents a hard attack. I like them, though. Again, this evening had an all-you-can-eat buffet which caused some health problems with the non-Indians the next day. Several people got sick, but luckily I didn’t have any problems. The evening also included a DJ and some dancing by the guests. The whole thing winded down around midnight when a few of us went with Deep to find someplace to go out and party some more. We went to a few places, but most were dead. We had a few drinks at one club in a hotel near the diplomatic section of town. We only stayed for one drink and went back to Deep’s (quite nice) place to have a couple more drinks and play his Xbox360 on his huge plasma screen TV with Bose surround sound system. Very nice indeed.

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I like how Indian weddings are set up – at least I this one. The wedding area actually consisted of two areas – an inside (and air conditioned) room with caterers serving drinks. Outside this room was a patio area where the actual wedding ceremony took place. The patio had a canopy where the couple would sit along with a Hindu holy man (terminology?) and his assistant (?). Around the canopy were pillows for guests to sit down and watch the ceremony. The ceremony was quite long so people drifted between the patio and inside. It was all very informal – for the guests anyway. During the ceremony people would move in close for a few pictures, head inside for a drink or two, then come back out and watch some more of the ceremony. Side conversations were going on throughout – both indoors and outdoors. After the ceremony was complete everyone headed to a dining room downstairs for a tasty buffet. Food is a very important part of an Indian wedding, which was all good by me – I was in heaven eating Indian food for 10 days. All the food, especially this evening, was exceptional.

One of the more annoying parts of the wedding was the camera crew who were at all the events. The camera crew wasn’t so much the problem as the “burn your retina to a crisp” spotlight on the video camera. These guys had managed to strap a large industrial halogen light to the top of the camera. There is no doubt in my mind that if aliens ever come to earth it will be because they will see this camera spotlight hundreds of light-years away – most likely blinding half of them in the process. I’m sure some guy in the International Space Station was like, “why the heck is there a bright light that keeps coming on around Delhi?” The portable supernova also necessitated the crew to walk around with a 100’ extension cord plugged into a wall outlet – because I’m sure even a car battery would only be able to power this bad-boy for about 10 milliseconds. I would love to see the video this camera took. I’m sure every segment had people giving a classic “deer caught in the headlights” pose. I know that’s the pose I gave because it was the only pose I could give – I couldn’t see anything else but that light. After the first night I seriously considered wearing sunglasses to all future events. A fair portion of the various wedding events consisted of me trying to avoid the camera crew. I felt bad for Liz and Josh. Hopefully their vision was not permanently impaired.

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Our destination – Sehgal Brothers, aka The Blues – was in South Extension Part 1. Our rickshaw driver confirmed he knew the location and we headed down in search of some new clothes. South Extension is basically two long strip malls on opposite sides of a major street – one side is “Part 1” and the other “Part 2”. We were dropped of on one side, which our driver confirmed was Part 1. We walked around looking all over for the store to no avail. Of course the temperature was hot and muggy so we had to augment our trip with an ice cream from McDonalds – which promptly melted before I could get to the bottom. After a good chunk of time searching we finally found out we were in Part 2 – on the wrong side of the road. The rickshaw driver obviously didn’t want to drive us the extra 0.5 km necessary to turn around to get to Part 1. We played a live game of Frogger and made it across the street and (finally) found our store.

We asked for the custom tailored suit section and were whisked to a back room on the top floor. Sehgal Bros. was one of the high end establishments in town so the cloth they had was all high quality Italian fabric. Their store carried basically all the high end brands – Versace, Gucci, Valentino, Trussardi, etc – so was a little intimidating to walk in. I was worried I wouldn’t even be able to afford a shirt there. As it turned out the prices were good. The fabric itself wasn’t significantly cheaper than US prices but, because the labor costs of getting the suits stitched was so cheap, the total cost of the suit ended up being at least 50% of what a similar suit (not even custom tailored) bought in the US would cost.

Geno had gone through the custom-tailored suit process before, but the process was all new to me. The back room was full of reams of different cloth. We would describe the type of suits we wanted. Two guys would scour the wall of fabric and pull off ream after ream. Geno and I would categorize the reams into “good”, “maybe” or “only a blind moose would wear that”. My plan was to get one dark business suit and another lighter summer suit to add to my current collection of one dark wool suit. As we went through the whole process I added another dark suit for a total of three suits making the sales staff that much happier. Geno added two suits to his collection and the store gave us a decent discount (after some haggling on our part) for purchasing a total of 5 suits from them. They then took our measurements and style requirements (single breast, 4 buttons on sleeve, etc). I had just increased the total number of suits I own by 400%. I figure as an MBA, chances are high that eventually I’ll have to wear a suit – I might as well purchase while the prices are low and quality is high. As it turned out, I got a bit carried away and added 5 custom tailored shirts and 4 ties to my 3 suits. Many of my female friends would be proud. Now I almost feel obligated to get a corporate suit-wearing job … almost.

The store was split between 2 buildings so after we were measured for the suits we went to the other building where we picked out fabrics and were measured for dress shirts that matched the fabric of our new suits. Finally we were finished with part I of our suit buying experience. We flagged down a rickshaw to head back to B-block, CR Park and the typical driving around in circles while the lost rickshaw driver asked directions over and over again.

The previous day the all the white people went to Fab India – a local clothing store specializing in traditional Indian clothing. I brought some dress clothes with me for the wedding, but opted to buy some traditional clothes for the Tuesday evening part of the wedding. I bought a red striped kurta and some white pajama pants (note: the word “pajama” comes from a similar Persian word meaning “leg garment” so these were not the plaid/superhero-type pajamas Westerners are accustomed to). The whole batch cost me something around $10 so it was worth it – at the very least for something cool to wear.

Day I of the wedding was at Josh’s parent’s house. The house had a large deck area where they built a tent. Adjacent to the tent area was a large common room where the rest of the festivities took place. Day one was basically for family and close friends – meaning about 75 people. They brought in some Rajasthani singers for some traditional song and dance. They consisted of a couple dancers – including a boy in a horse costume – a harmonium, drums and a couple singers. I really liked the harmonium instrument. It’s basically a pedal pumped organ and used fairly extensively in Indian music. Afterwards the party moved under the deck with a DJ, caterers, and more dancing. I think I sweat off about 5 pounds during the party from all the dancing and the muggy evening heat. My new Indian clothes were ready for the laundry.

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The Qtub Minar complex

The Qtub Minar and Iron Pillar to the right

Old Delhi – taken from the steps of the mosque

Wearing our leg-covering skirts

Jama Masjid Mosque and scorching hot stone plaza

Jama Masjid Mosque

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