Sari Shopping!

     I imagined myself walking down the street at a small village market, surrounded by bright colored sarees, looking for the perfect sari that a women had spent hours making, then asking her to help me try it on. WRONG! Reality check- it is 2011 in India too...and they do most of their clothes shopping at the mall. When I came to India and realized how many women wear sarees and salwar kameezes, I finally understood that they shop for these "everyday clothes" at the mall, just like we would shop at our stores. There are so many shops full of Indian clothing from stores like our Target to Bloomingdales. Walking through the mall trying to find a sari was incredibly difficult! Mostly because you can't just buy a sari right there. A lot of women buy the material that is usually the appropriate length for any sari, they hem it there and cut off some of the material to make a top to match, which you have to take to a tailor to get made for you. Then you have to buy a skirt that matches the color so you can wear underneath and use the waist line to tuck in the sari! Some of the really nice stores had sarees premade, but they were hundreds of US dollars. Some of the designs and different types of sarees were so beautiful they looked like gowns.

     After an hour of trying on different sarees, Rianne and I decided not to get one because we have no where to wear it, an underskirt, a tailor to make the shirt, and we would need to learn how to put it on! The store we went to was so much fun because we had four guys helping us, getting us all different colors, and they were the ones dressing us! One guy even put on a skirt to show us how it worked haha. Definitely not the expereince I had in mind, but they were so helpful and funny, we were really thankful they let us try them on.

   

I have a new appreciation for the women I see everyday wearing a sari walking down the dirty street, riding a motorcycle, working all day in the office, etc. They must be extremly comfortable and natural to them, but when I tried them on, I thought they seemed like a lot to maintain (and hard to keep from falling off!). They look extremely elegant in them but the way the middle is open seems very revealing to me! I couldn't imagine wearing one every day. I also don't know how they manage to keep them so clean when they are in dirt, its humid and everyone is sweating, and the material looks like it has special washing instructions. It would be so fun to wear one to a nice dinner or party here, but I don't see myself wearing it anywhere else. We did buy a salwar kameez (the other traditional outfit they wear) for our trip to Agra to see the Taj Mahal!