The Tailor

Today was a great day. We had our first class which consisted of watching a movie. Now this is no ordinary movie, it's a Bollywood movie, which means it was about 3 hours long, which means, it was our whole class time for the day. Then I got my Indian cell phone, which is so much nicer than my phone, that it rounds the bend of funny, and is just sad. After that some friends and I went to the fabric store. At these stores you tell them what you want and what you like and they pull out pretty much every single thing that they have regardless of anything you said. When we had each created a small pile (like... you know... small as in a small explosion), we bought our fabric for our saris and salwaar kameezes and headed to the tailor. The tailors shop was in what looked like a garage for dolls. It was about the size of a regular Manhattan apartment's closet. One by one they measured us and we watched their faces as we told them to move their fingers down our backs to show how short our sari blouses, how deep our necklines and how low our backs would be. At some point the guy that sold us our fabric even cycled over to join in on the discussion "Saat, ha?" "Nahin, aat." "Saat behter" (Translation: 7[inches] yes? No, 8. 7 is better). After lots of discussion, some intense price negotiations and waiting for two immense cows to cross by us, we finally got on our way home. All in all, I got one fancy sari, one fancy salwaar kameez, and 2 casual salwaar kameezes all custom made for about 40 bucks. Considering how long the last week has been I can't even conceive of waiting another one for all my stuff, but I will have to. And so will you. Stay tuned, ek haftay me, mein aap logon ko foto doongi (In a week I will post the pictures).

Love,

Violet