Attending My First Indian Wedding

For many years, I've been curious about what an Indian wedding would be like and I was excited to finally get to experience it yesterday! Here are the things I learned about Indian weddings...


1) They don't start on time. We were told to arrive by 9:30 but the ceremony did not start until 11:30.

2) Part of the reason why the ceremony started late was because we were served breakfast and chai before going up to the ceremony. Their breakfast food included (and i don't know the official names for them) deep fried battered vegetables and deep fried breaded cheese. 

3) Before entering the ceremony, everyone must have their heads covered and their shoes removed. Men and women take a different set of stairs to go up to the ceremony and they also sit on separate sides of the room.


4) When you enter, you must present a money offering of coins to the front and touch your head to the ground. 

5) The ceremony is about 2 hours long, filled with the reading of passages and song. Everything was in punjabi but thankfully, they had an overhead with the translation.

6) The bride and groom get to wear the coolest outfits ever. The groom has on a traditional indian outfit and he gets to carry around... a sword!!! The bride wears red and gold and is beautifully adorned with jewels... absolutely breathtaking!

7) After the ceremony, you eat again! The whole meal was vegetarian but very delicious! It reminded me of a bento box, but indian style :)


If you are ever invited to an indian wedding, make sure you invest in a sari. My sister-in-law and i thought that since there would be other non-indian attendees, it would be okay for us to wear non-indian attire. We were wrong... everyone including non-indian people were wearing saris so you can imagine how much we stood out... but it was a great time nonetheless :) 

Have you attended an Indian wedding before?

 

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Eat Like a Lady.

...which is probably the exact opposite of how I eat. I don't know about you, but i grew up with an older brother and i had to eat fast and get lots in advance if i wanted to eat at all! That's why it's nice to change things up a bit from time to time and enjoy a nice girly afternoon having afternoon tea.

chicken salad in a waffle cone - it doesn't look too appetizing but it was actually pretty good!
My girlfriends and I caught up with each other at the Urban Tea Merchant in Downtown Vancouver a few weeks ago. This was my second time ever having afternoon tea and I quite enjoyed it! It was a different experience from my first time at the Fairmont Pacific Rim as this was a little less "fancy" which meant it was more affordable, they had a bigger and more creative tea selection (mango flower black tea...amazing), annnnd best part of all - you get your own tower. I liked this better because I didn't have to think about the speed at which i took things off the tower and ate them, whether or not i should wait for the other person to get their share of chocolate dipped strawberry before i get mine, etc, etc. :P The food was much simpler though, you can tell just from the photos (in comparison to my tea experience here).

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Hi, You're Fat.

I was going to blog about a tea party today but I decided to switch gears instead and write about this topic, inspired after i got many passionate comments on this facebook status update i posted today:

"I love my culture, I do. I just don't understand why we think it's okay to call people fat to their faces. That person might laugh along with you and agree, but you don't know what's really going on inside."

I know this is common in Filipino culture (and probably many other Asian and non-Asian cultures, young and old) where you are greeted this way. Not even a "hello, how are you, you've gotten fatter" it's just straight up "you're so fat!" accompanied with a smile... not knowing the effect of their "casual" words. Many people use excuses like "we are just being brutally honest!" or "it's just our culture" or "it's just the way we were raised!" but...

would you feel comfortable using those excuses to someone who became anorexic because of it? bulimic? depressed? suicidal?

I guess what i'm trying to say is...

Words are powerful, let's use them

to uplift people instead!

tweet, tweet // i design clothing: www.herrohachi.com // book of faces // tumblr

Life Lessons From a Stranger

Hola, friends! I'm still here! It's been a busy month so far with moving as well as releasing a new fall/winter line for my clothing line which you can check out here (if you haven't yet!). Last Sunday, I took part in a little show that celebrated Vancouver as well as raised funds for Cystic Fibrosis research, it was called the "We Love Vancouver" festival. A young guy passed by my table, stopped, back tracked then asked my friend and I:

Guy: What is this about?
Me + Friend: It's the "We Love Vancouver" festival
Guy: *leans in and gives us a suspicious look*...... Do you really love Vancouver?
Me + Friend: Uhhh... yeah.
Guy: F**K VANCOUVER!!!
Me + Friend: O___O

To try to break the ice, I asked him "Oh, are you Filipino?" which turned out to be a huge mistake b/c after that, I guess it did break the ice... enough for him to tell my friend and i his life's frustrations for the next 20 minutes. I won't bore you with the details of his rant but in the end, he left us with some pretty valuable life lessons. SO valuable that I thought it would be wrong not to share it with you... get your pens and papers ready for note taking. (these lessons are not exaggerated)

1) To survive in life, you must always lie. 
2) Always be negative, never be positive. 
3) If someone asks you for money, beat them up instead. 

It was a very awkward and uncomfortable conversation... actually, it wasn't even a conversation as we couldn't get a word in (we were trying to tell him that the answer to his problem is to MOVE if he hates our city so much). I feel for the guy as it's evident he has some real hurt and anger in his life but I hope you know that that really isn't the lesson I want you to depart with... the real lesson is:

Use your energy to fix the problem instead of complaining about it!

Have you learned a "valuable" lesson 

from a stranger lately? 

tweet, tweet // i design clothing: www.herrohachi.com // book of faces // tumblr