Day one of the Beckie & Chintan's wedding - The Blessings

Beckie and her parents Jo and Richard :D

Hi everyone :)

So Wednesday evening we arrived in Ahmedabad, we got picked up by the hotels' taxi man and he was no where near as friendly as the one in Delhi, his English was non existent and he stunk of BO... It was 10pm by the time we got to our hotel and all we wanted was something to eat and something alcoholic to drink. Ahmedabad is in a dry state so drinking alcohol is illegal and also they don't eat meat here, the restaurants just serve paneer (like cottage cheese) in dishes. So we've 5 days of being sober... probably a good thing for our livers!

We had a bit of "Delhi belly" so we have tried to steer clear from hot curries as we didn't want to encourage anymore spells so we've been eating fruit raita (its like sweet yoghurt with fruit in) that's pretty much been our breakfasts for the last couple of days.

Anyway back to what we did... Wednesday night just went to the hotel after getting some food and slept until lunch time Thursday, we contacted Beckie and arranged to meet up. We went over to Chintans parent's house and met his family, ohh they were so nice and welcoming :) Johnny and Paige (Beckie's brother and his "wife" were there too and oh my gosh it was so nice to speak to other English people!) We went off for a coffee and our taxi driver took us home via a shop so we could get Indian attire for the blessing which was happening the following day.

Friday Morning we had to be at Chintan's house for 9am, the same unfriendly smelly cab man drove us over there after being half an hour late; the first blessing was in full swing.

First blessing - morning session

Chintan's house 

Everyone looked so good in their Indian wear and again lots of friends and family of the Gadani's were at their house welcoming Beckie into their family and the Hindu Pujari (priest) was chanting to Beckie and Chintan, i'm not so sure what was going on but a couple of the younger girls there were explaining it to us as things were happening. We participated in the rituals that were being done throughout the day.
There was probably about 40/50 people in their house during the day and everyone was so nice to us :)


After the blessing finished we were all invited over to the Hindu temple for lunch and there was religious significance to this trip too, the men had to pour water over a statue in a worship area of the temple (sorry i'm not describing things well and any Hindu's reading please don't take offence lol)

After lunch (which I couldn't eat as my Delhi belly hadn't settled and my appetite was lost) we went back to the house where the second blessing was done. There was quite a bit of waiting around and the blessings did go on for quite a while so we hovered around in the room for a bit and went off as it was hard for us to understand what was going on. The Pujari was chanting a lot and there was a goddess that went into this body at one point.   We spent the afternoon on their roof terrace to catch the sun. 

Chintan's parents organised a caterer to come in for the evening and served us all South Indian cuisine, this was lovely but very spicy and luckily my appetite returned lol :)

After dinner one of Chintans Dad's friends dropped us back to our hotel in Old Ahmedabad and I went straight to sleep, such a long long day as we didn't get back until 9ish

Will post up the actual Wedding later on today, internet is very slow here! :) The best is yet to come! xxxxx