I once went to a Hindu wedding
It took place in a large hall in a Hindu temple, with a stage. My good friend the groom and the bride together with the officiating cleric were up on the stage, dressed in the most outlandish fashion including the first pair of actual, real-life, genuine shoes-that-curl-into-a-spiral-at-the-tip that I'd ever seen.

My friends & I all arrived together and we discovered to our that our good friend, the groom, had had us all labelled "honoured guests of the groom" which meant we were kind of the equivalent of the best man en masse and although we took no part in the ceremony, we did get to sit right at the front of the hall, up with the parents of the wedded parties. Seeing as none of us was religious, let alone Hindu, and we were all white we felt genuinely embarrassed that we might be taking the best seats before people who might, well, be more interested in the whole proceedings. We were just there to support our friend and for the curry (which was excellent).

As things got underway, once we'd all had a good giggle at the shoes, it dawned on us that this wasn't going to be the most interesting spectacle ever. It was - unsurprisingly when you think about it - conducted entirely in Hindi, which none of us spoke. So we sat and shuffled our feet a little as the mums and dads next to us got all teary-eyed over the wedding of their darling children.

After a little longer it dawned on us that there were relatively few similarities to the Christian-model weddings that we were used to. One major point of difference was speed. This one went on.

And on.

(in a language none of us understood)

And on.

We grew restless. We grew bored. We began the early stages of nicotine withdrawal. Our legs cramped. Our brains began to turn to jelly. But out of a profound respect for a culture to which we were foreign and which had welcomed us with open arms, and for those parents we were sharing a table with and who were clearly wholly absorbed in the ceremony before them, we endured stoically and in silence.

It was awful.

Eventually, it ended. There was no reception afterwards in the traditional sense (no alcohol, you see) but people hung around and chatted. We went outside for a cigarette. And shortly we were joined by the newly married husband who'd been gasping for a fag as much as we had.

"Why?" we cried "Why did you not warn us in advance?"

"Does go on a bit, doesn't it" he admitted. "But then .. " and a sly grin began to spread across his face ".. if you're not sat at the front, it's considered acceptable to chat amongst yourselves, or even leave the room for a while if you want to."

"But you listed us as honoured guests!" we cried "We couldn't do that".

"No" he said, grinning like a fucking Cheshire cat "You couldn't"

He was a lucky man not to have been beaten to a pulp on his own wedding day, by his own "honoured guests".
(MattDP (Squiggle), Fri 2 Sep 2011, 16:57, 2 replies)

I've been to one of them
Four hours, it went on. And apparently that's the short version.
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Fri 2 Sep 2011, 17:00, closed)

I want to go to a Seikh wedding.
Apparently they're on a par with Northern English weddings for booze consumption.
(Me, I'm not... in any way intoxicated, Fri 2 Sep 2011, 20:03, closed)