This is one of the many palaces of the nizams, who were the regional leaders of the area (area= anywhere from half of India to finally just the state of Andra Pradesh over the course of a few hundred years). The man who took us here used to be the director of the place for about 6 years and was really informative about the restoration process of just about everything. He had a pretty tight relationship with the family of nizams that was left and so told us some fun stories. He also had access to everything, so we got to go behind any roped off areas and into this super secluded guest house area where they still let high officials and visitors stay when they come into town.
View from one of the courtyards
Just a decorative cannon. Only would have been useful
if there had been an attack on their pond.
I love these flowers.
Hall where the nizam would sit when there were formal gatherings.
Adam explaining about how he found all these
weapons in a well he excavated.
SWORDS!!!
Riding around in style was important.
Hanging out in another courtyard.
I really like these trees, but the sun was so bright.
Books from a secret library.
Daniel would make a great nizam.
We were meant for royalty.
If I knew Arabic or Hindi, this library would have been even more awesome.
Charminar
To find out what this is, we'll break it down a little bit.
charm= the power or quality of delighting, attracting, or fascinating others
inar= a Hittite god of woods and fields.
That doesn't sound quite right, maybe we should use Urdu. Ah yes, here it is:
Char= 4
Minar= Towers
So it's the 4 towers, which is twice as good as the two towers. If you thought Daniel had a thing for the two towers, you should have seen his joy when we got to see FOUR towers. As Adam (our guide/friend) explained it, there are other places similar to the charminar in other places of India, but this is one of the most extravagant. In ancient times (or pre-widely used compass times) when a traveller came into a city they could use the charminar as a guide post, as each arch points to one of the cardinal directions (North, South, etc, not like the ones dressed in red with funny hats). In addition, they could use the shelter provided from the charminar to rest before they began their journey again.
Since it is also near the palace and the main part of the city, it is surrounded by tourists and merchants. You can buy anything your heart desires (as long as your heart desires fruit, jewelry, or imported goods from China). However, if you want to park, you will have to either be on a motorcycle or find a spot half a mile away, since neither of those conditions fit us, we admired the building from our air conditioned car.
It's a pretty big deal.
Want a backpack? How about a pile of clothes?
The Charminar!
Some paan that we had after a meal of Hyderabadi Biryani.
Golconda Fort
Built originally of mud in the 13th century, Golconda Fort is an impressively large structure with amazing acoustics. If you go on a Sunday afternoon (like us) then you may be just as impressed by the mass amount of tourist as you are by the mass amounts of rock. Although there are signs up to encourage you to respect the ruins, you can find many children (or childish adults) running around on top of structures, around barricades, and hanging from various heights to impress their friends. It's a nice little hike to the top of the fort and a pleasant view and breeze to meet you when you reach it.
The doors had spikes on them to prevent against
elephant attacks, something you don't see in Europe.
I love the peaked arches.
Some of the outer walls.
The forts! (and some lawns, nice for a picnic)
A view of the fort and city.
Panorama of the fort and a lot of Hyderabad.
This kid followed us for like 20 minutes trying to
sell us cotton candy, eventually we just
gave him money and took his picture.
This is not meant to be a comprehensive guide, just a basic overview based on our limited experience.
Preparing for the event: What should I wear? The traditional Hindi wedding dress is bright red, so it is recommended that you wear anything else. You can still wear red, just make sure the majority of your dress isn't red. Although, from what I could gather after being at the wedding, no one is going to mistake you for the bride in any of the pictures unless you also happen to be wearing 50+ bracelets and 6 inches worth of flower garlands with cornmeal in your hair. As long as you avoid this style, you should be fine. Most people will be wearing business casual type of wear, for women this means a colorful sari and for men it is jeans and a button up shirt, possibly slacks and a button up shirt. Family members will be wearing more tradition clothes, but if you are family, you don't have to read this post to find out what to wear. What gift should I bring?
Some modern couples will create a gift registry of sorts, but you can never go wrong with a pretty envelope full of money. Make sure that it is an odd number, usually to help out with this if you buy a wedding envelope it will conveniently have a 1 rupee piece pasted onto the front. Not sure why, but this will bring luck. If you want to get something for the couple you can always bring some sort of gold statue of a god, kitchenware, or if you are really close, jewelry for the bride. There isn't really a "gift table" so once the ceremony is over you all gather on stage to meet the bride and groom and you have to give them the gift then. You will probably have 10 seconds (30 if you are lucky) so I would recommend just an envelope with money, it is also considered one of the most considerate gifts, bonus.
The Wedding Itself:
Traditional Hindu weddings are not a day long event, they contain days worth of ceremonies, including painting the bride with mehndi (also known as henna), home decorations, engagements with written proposals, groom parades, etc. As we were only friends, we were invited to one of the last rituals, it only last for 2 hours and then there was the food, mingling, and dancing. Side note: before a bride is married her female relations gather together to cover her in mehndi designs, hidden inside some of these intricate patterns, they hide the names of the bride and groom. Theoretically the groom isn't allowed to do anything on their wedding night until he can find the names.
Our invitation said that the wedding started at 9:45 am and when we arrived at 9:45 am, we were there with only 10 other people in a large auditorium with a stage and a large covering set up with 3 million flowers. After 15 minutes we heard a loud drum procession and looking out the window saw the groom being carried on the shoulders of his male family members up into the building.
Good thing these were hanging on the gates, gotta
make sure that we were at the right place.
Walk way outside that led up to the building.
Stage with flowers hanging down and the camera set up.
We watched as they awkwardly tried to get through doorways and up the steps to the stage and then the groom was sat in a chair facing the audience. The entire ceremony was in Telegu (I think, could have also been Sanskrit, Hindi, or Klingon) and so it was hard to understand what was happening. Thankfully, there was a camera crew with a camera crane to pan the audience and get our reactions as well as a crew on the stage itself and everything was broadcast on a screen off to the side. Thanks to this projection and the wonderful 1980s clipart that accompanied it, we were able to watch some of the various rituals.
This part went on for well over 2 hours and presided over by a Hindu priest speaking with the voice of a televangelist, so to detail exactly how it went would be difficult. To give you an insight into some of the highlights though:
The groom got to wear a white suit with turban and what appeared to be a pure diamond unibrow and face the audience while the bride had family members ceremoniously place more necklaces and bracelets then I thought physically possible.
After the bride was covered in jewels, one of the sets of parents came and washed the groom's feet and then painted them yellow and red.
Groom had lots of milk and sugar poured into his hand which he had to drink and then after about an hour he got to turn around and see his bride, but was still separated by a large sheet that some people held up.
The priest said some things and then the bride and groom played footsie (maybe toesie would be a better word, there was this weird round pillow that they had to put their foot on and then caressed each others toes with their own toes).
Lots of pouring water through each others hands and exchanging more flower garlands.
At one point they each had a tropical leaf with what looked like a beef patty in it and I thought maybe they were going to feed it to each other, but instead they smooshed it on each others heads. Then for about 15 minutes they poured cornmeal on each other, just throwing it on each other's heads. It looked like a lot of fun-- wedding food fight! When it was over and everyone came up to greet them what you did was take a hand full of cornmeal from a bowl and then sprinkle some on each of their heads and then move on. Why don't we do this in America?
There was no wedding ring exchanged, at least, not a finger ring. The groom did give the bride a toe ring at which point Daniel started singing "if you like it then you better put a toe ring on it"
At the end they got to sit in fancy king chairs while hundreds of people threw food at them and congratulated them.
The happy bejeweled couple.
Flowers seem so much nicer than car paint.
Indian weddings are typically quite large -- 500 to 1,000 people will attend for at least some part of the wedding. You can usually tell when the ceremonies are wrapping up and the food is about to start because the auditorium will suddenly start to fill up quickly. Once the ceremony is over all the men in the audience go up to meet the couple and then the women and once you have made it across the stage you can file out to the eating area. One great thing about Indian events is that there will always be food and lots of it. The plates when we went were 2-3 times larger than any other plate I have ever eaten off of and there was plenty of food to fill them with. Curries, sweets, fruits, rices, and flat breads filled us to bursting and then we started in on the ice cream/ kulfi.
There was also plenty of music and even if we could have understood the language of the wedding, I'm sure it would have all been drowned out by the constant beating of the drummers through out the entire thing. There was a band setting up as we started to eat and I believe they were about to begin dancing, but we were too full and tired to stay any longer. However, if you do ever find yourself at a Hindu wedding and you have any inclinations to dance, I would recommend learning a bit of bhangra. Daniel and I watched the video below a few times and had we not been so full of food were ready to show off our dance moves.
What is the most interesting wedding tradition you have seen/done? Is there any tradition that you just can't stand?
The owner of our school has taken a liking to us, at least that's all I can assume after he invited us over to his house. He fed us delicious lychee juice and then offered us some fruit from his farm. Mr. Noble is a respectable business man who originally got into computers with electronics engineering back in the day in college and the only reason he opened a school to teach about networking was because he needed employees. Something along the lines of him needing people to help set up his networks, but he knew more about routers than they did and they would charge him large amounts of money and later he would just have to fix it anyway. So he didn't start his school to get rich and if you see the low prices on his classes (even for Indian standards) you can tell that it's not really for him to get rich (although he seems to have other methods for it since he is probably one of the wealthiest Indian/any nationality man I will be likely to meet).
We told him about our previous attempts at trying to walk around the KBR National park and he said that he goes every morning and would be happy to take us with him. So we walk around the park with him and he took us out to see his farm house over the weekend. Since he said that normally no one lived there and that he only really went there on weekends and had only started it this year -- I had been expecting a small lot with a few trees and maybe some vegetables. But being Mr. Noble, it was a large few acre plot with almost a hundred fruit trees (mango, papaya, goa, sweet lime, etc), vegetables, three coops of birds-- more than 20 chickens, then geese, ducks, and about 50 love birds. There were also two houses on the property a few fountains and a field perfect for playing cricket. Actually, I can't validate that cricket comment. I have no idea how you play cricket or what the requirements are on the size of the field, only that it seems people play it on any sort of field if they can. I guess if they can't play cricket then at least the crickets can play on it.
Papaya, how did I never know how delicious you were?
The alien fruit that you saw in fruit stand pictures earlier,
turns out it was a papaya.
Pure deliciousness.
View of the lane at the farm house.
Ducks with weird faces.
The goose pond, different from the duck pond, of course.
Geese scare me, nothing is more terrifying than a goose hiss.
The national bird of India is a peacock. It is illegal to capture, kill, or feed one, but if you go to the right place you can see plenty (and if you are lucky you can probably even feed one a biscuit).
Our staple food, veggie curry and 3 plain naan
Makhaniya lassi aka fruit and yogurt and pistachio lassi
The pot from the lassi, since they gave it to us for take out.
It helps to decorate our room now.
Just some kids playing in the rubble
One of the streets on the way to our favorite restaurant
Yoga in the park.
I love tree houses, found this randomly in the park.
Last week was Diwali. Festival of lights. Christmas lights on every tree and house, little clay pots full of oils/candles/incense to burn, and the most audible demonstration of the festival of lights was the fireworks. 3 days of non-stop fireworks. Imagine a combination of Christmas, Fourth of July and that holiday where we set out food for a god to come eat while we ring bells and give each other dried fruits and nuts. (I always forget the name of that holiday... Easter?)
I particularly enjoyed the door decorations. In front of almost every house (where there are houses) there were designs in chalk. Some were more extravagant than others. I recently finished reading a historical fiction called "Creation" by Gore Vidal. The narrator/main character of the book lived during the time of the Persian empire under Kings Darius, Xerxes and Artaxerxes. During that time he traveled to India and it was interesting to see from that perspective how little things had changed from then and now. He mentions the 64 Hindu Arts and so I looked them up and found some of them most entertaining. You have the typical ones that you think of when you think of "accomplished ladies" (almost Jane Austen-y) -- dancing, singing, painting, instrumental music, etc and then some that are very unique. In fact, I think I might start another blog adventure where I take time to try and learn all of the arts. A few that I found particularly interesting include:
Making decorative floral and grain designs on the floor
Creating music with water
Magic and illusions
Tongue twisters and difficult recitation
You should take a look at the list and tell me which ones you think would be most fun to learn. Wikipedia has a good list you can find here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_art.
Some pictures for you to enjoy
We bought the pots and found the little statue on the side of the road.
One of the best door decorations I've seen so far, or at least the brightest.
More art.
Most are created like this with white chalk and some flower petals.
Not almond milk, it's cow's milk flavored of almonds.
Tasted like maraschino cherries to me.
The mosque we pass on our way to get food.
One of our house guests.
Unfortunately he was in a hurry and couldn't stay for long.
Just a wild monkey, hanging out on the streets.
Most surprising thing: he was actually eating a banana.
If it weren't $10 I would definitely buy these.
Olives stuffed with pickles, what a perfect combo.
Backpack bigger than the kid.
Tried to get a picture of a smaller kid with a bigger backpack, but he was too fast.
