Given that all weddings are astronomically driven, and that only certain days of the month are considered auspicious, it’s proving a bit hard to find a nice Hall in the month of April as the pundits have only ordained 2 days as being auspicious… go figure.
We spent the entire day driving about Chennai, and surprisingly enough only, in the course of a full day only were able to see two. This is largely due to the density of the traffic… It quite literally can take several hours to traverse just a handful of miles.
All said and done, I did have a preference in the wedding halls that we looked at, but I will keep that to myself for the most part and let the Ganesan’s make that decision.
(Hint).
Was a very busy day, and everything went as well as it could. Perhaps I’ll get Geetha to fill in some more information regarding the whole Kalyanam process/places/and stuff…
If you’d like to see the whole album for our day it can be found here
Our travel to India was completed this morning about 3am Chennai time as we checked into our hotel room and finally were able to sleep in a fully horizontal position. 30 hours of travel is never fun, but we made it through mostly unscathed.
As we left the house this(yesterday?) morning it was snowing like a bastard and the driving was miserable. Within about 20 minutes of checking in, the plane was delayed, and our hopes were readily sinking… Elavating our nervousness to near panic attack, when we called British Air to see what our options were if we never made it to JFK, we found out that because we didn’t book our Burlington – JFK tickets through BA that NO changes to our ticket would be allowed, and if we failed to make our connection at JFK it was entirely at the discretion of the gate crew if we could even buy another ticket… Well after making the worst case planning (we’d do our best to get to NYC, and if we had to buy all new tickets Geetha would go to India, and I would go Home), we just settled in and tried to maintain a “no sense worrying over things you can’t change” attitude. It ALMOST worked…
Fortunately, and rather rapidly the snow fall just stopped in Burlington, and planes started landing and taking off… We made it to JFK only about 2 hours behind schedule, and from that point on our trip was pretty much as un-eventful as a 30 hour odessey could be…
As I type this Geetha is not feeling well and is in bed sleeping. We’re due to get downstairs for some breakfast and to get our day started. Hopefully some caffeine will curb her migraine.
Bye for now.
Geetha called her family in the Porur area of Chennai today to find that there has been extensive flooding, and that her parent’s house has actually been impacted.
It would seem that although the street they live on is one of the few in their area that is not flooded, the ground around their house is so saturated with water that it has begun seeping through the flooring in the lower levels. Geetha was on the phone for quite some time, and although it seemed pretty drastic, eventually the conversation seemed to focus more so on our trip, and “sister talk.”
We’re hoping everything is okay for them, and I personally am hoping they are takng care of themselves and not worrying /about our arrival.
Geetha’s long conversation today did drive home the fact that I need to expedite my learning Tamil. If not to talk or speak to be able to understand. It is very very frustrating for me not to be able to understand things, and once Geetha and her family get into their conversation they understandably quickly forget my mono-linquistic limitations.
The count down has officially begun in only SIX days we will be on a plane heading to India!
Have added link in metadata for weather in Chennai. Or you can just click Here.
