Scott and I were invited to what must tie for the one of the biggest / fanciest weddings in Bangladesh, ever. The gossip on the street is that the cost of the wedding was ~$1.7...MILLION before you add in the cost of jewelry and clothes for the bride and groom. It was held in the national convention center - think about having your wedding at the Kennedy Center. Extravagant and a must see! To prepare for the event, we rushed out last weekend (here they send out invites only a week or two before the event unlike 4 to 6 months ahead of time in the US) and bought a sari and a panjabi and had a tailor come to our house to measure me for a sari blouse and scott for panjabi pants which were delivered 2 days later; what service.
You may have heard that weddings in South Asia can last 5 days each filled with different celebrations. The big event that we were going to was the dinner. Quite literally, the purpose of the event is to eat - you arrive, are ushered to a table, fed a meal, and then leave. That's it. The event started at 7:30pm so we planned on getting there about 8pm and figured we would be out by 9pm.
Shilpi and Shobita agreed not only to babysit Henry but to also help wrap and pin me up in a perfectly folded and creased sari. We had a great time getting me all dressed up.
Don't you just love our matching outfits? We thought it was pretty clever.
The entrance:
The first room we were directed into was where the bride and groom had been sitting on stage on super fancy couches or perhaps more accurately thrones. We missed them by 5 minutes.
Although blury, this photo shows the whole sari including the beautiful bottom part not captures in our first photo.
Then we were corralled to a dining room, one of at least three. Actually, we weren't just directed to the room but to a specific side of the room with 60 tables. The room we ended up in easily held 800 people if not more. Here are some views from along the way:
The food was amazing, some of the best biryani we've ever had. Just by chance, we ended up sitting with the leaders of two political parties and an advocat at the Supreme Court. Interesting. Within 35 minutes we were done and out door. We were encouraged to go to the dessert table and although we walked passed it we just couldn't fit in more food. By 9pm we were calling the driver to pick us up.
When we got back in the car the driver estimated that 3000 cars that had dropped off guests at that point, which was an early bird 9pm. Assuming 2.5 people in each car, certainly by 11:00pm ~10,000 guests were going to pass through. Wow. Well then we got stuck post-wedding traffic resulting in it taking us 30 minutes to go the first 1/2 kilometer. What a night.
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