West Coast is Best Coast! Part 1
Hello everyone! I'm finally back after a hectic couple of weeks. With preparing for my trip and actually being in California I definitely tried to write, but it's a little difficult without access to a computer and not having any down time for over a week!
I woke up at 4:30am on Thursday morning, running on only 3 hours of sleep and got ready for my 7:30am flight! As difficult as it was to wake up that morning, landing at 11am Cali time was totally worth it, although a can of Redbull or Monster probably would have helped me get through my day a little better. Getting through a 5 and a half hour flight without getting any sleep is probably the most irritating aspect of flying for me, but hopefully in the future I'll find a way to get some Z's!
As soon as I landed, as usual, my first stop was In N Out! Never underestimate the power of a good animal style burger, animal style fries and a Neapolitan shake right after a long flight!
On Thursday night after running around to put last minute outfit details together I attended a fun jago/sangeet/pre-wedding ceremony. This event is usually the most colorful of them all and involves close family and friends celebrating one more time before the actual wedding. I'll have another blog post coming out soon for those of you who are interested in all of the different makeup/outfit looks I came up with throughout my trip! I spent the night yawning but eventually after being awake for over 24 hours I managed to get a decent night's sleep.
Friday was full of catching up with friends and family since the wedding I was attending was on Saturday. This was when I FINALLY got to go back to a restaurant called Simply Thai in Newark, CA with one of my closest friends, Harpreet. It's by far one of my favorite Thai restaurants and it's up there with my favorite restaurants in Cali. As usual, I had the penang chicken curry that I had been craving since my last trip in December. I have yet to find a Thai restaurant in central Jersey that is just as good.I called it and early night as I was to wake up at 5am to get ready for the wedding.
Thankfully, I had curled my hair the day before and we're required to cover our head with our chunnis/duppatta/scarf/stole/whatever you want to call it so that saved me a good hour during the whole getting ready process. Although the rain put a damper on our morning (no pun intended) the anand karaj ceremony was beautiful! The groom's friends and close male family members wore mint blue paghs, bowties and pocket squares and the bridesmaids wore simple but elegant dark peach outfits while the bride and groom stuck to the traditional but radiant red and gold. Even with all the fog and rain, El Sobrante Gurdwara had a gorgeous view from it's place at the top of a huge hill and didn't fail to leave me stunned even though it was my second time there.
Since the reception was the same day, it only left us a few hours to get a power nap in and get ready once again. To my misfortune I had to forgo my pre-reception nap and get to handling the mess that was my hair after all of the rain that day. I will never understand why it ends up raining every time I'm in California although they're in a drought but I guess that's bad luck for me and great news for California! Trying to save myself some time I attempted to just touch up the makeup I already had on from the morning before but instead my face turned from a grey/black smokey eye to an "I got punched in both eyes and have flour on my face" look real quick. Of course I had to re-do all of my makeup which had me running late before I even had the opportunity to get my sari tied. After a few failed attempts and rushing over to a close family friend's house I was able to save my outfit (sacrificing the first 2 hours of the reception party). It was finally time to have some fun! Also attending was the well- known Joty Kay who also happens to be a good friend of mine although this was the first time we had met in person! We spent the night dancing and obnoxiously singing along to every song that was played and I decided that I would officially never wear a sari to a punjabi wedding reception again. During the last hour of the reception I spent more time trying to re-pin and fix my sari than on the dance floor. Big thanks to Joty and Pooja for coming to my rescue when a sari mishap was about to occur! I really don't know how some women can don saris on a daily basis with no trouble.
This post seems long enough without the rest of the details from my trip so I think I'll stop here! Stay tuned for part 2!
