Zafira 9/5/16 Zafira 9/5/16

The Wedding Series: Part 2/2 - The Mehndi, Wedding and Home Shenanigans | Zafira

Hello!

Sometime in July, I did the first part of this series and here I present to you the last. I spoke a little more about traditional Bengali weddings and how the whole process works so I won't go into too much detail here. To conclude what I said in the last post, a typical Bengali wedding has the Cinifan (engagement), the Mehndi (wedding pre-party), the actual wedding and sometimes people like to take it that one step extra and throw a Walima (an after party). It's chaotic and crazy but I love weddings. In this post, I'll show you some of the pictures of the Mehndi, the wedding and a few little bits we did with the new bride after she was welcomed into her new home. I'll explain what is going on for every picture so don't worry if you don't understand. Enjoy!

T H E M E H N D I

At a Mehndi, everyone basically takes pictures with friends, family and the groom or bride.

We boogie.

Get our henna done.

And everyone joins in, including the little ones.

We wear traditional clothing and get dressed up, not overly dressed though, we like to save that for the wedding.

There's always something yummy to eat too like these fruit thaals and those amazing desserts.

Everything is always made to look super duper pretty.

Here's a fun fact. all the little flowers that you see hanging and the ones on the wall are ALL handmade and we hung the curtain bits all by ourselves too. We're pretty handy when it comes to this sort of thing.

Here's one of my uncle dressed in traditional clothing infront of all the food that's been made for him. At the Mehndi, everyone comes and takes a seat next to him, takes a couple of pics and feeds him something.

T H E W E D D I N G

For the wedding we changed the setup a little bit and added some gold chiffon. The bride comes home with the groom at the end of the wedding and they sit here and drink milk and do some other traditional stuff.

We all get very dressed up including the groom.

All the neighbours were out watching us leave the house to the wedding venue and it was just too adorable not to capture this moment.

This is such a good idea for a guestbook! You write your little message to newly weds on the heart and slot it into the frame.

Snap snap.

This is when the bride walked onto the stage to her husband.

Both the groom side and bride side make a necklace of flowers for the couple and these are exchanged on the wedding day.

This is the best bit. There was so much cake leftover.

Aaand this is the bedroom that we decorated for them.

H O M E S H E N A N I G A N S

The next morning or what usually turns out to be afternoon, the new bride will make breakfast for everyone in the house. The breakfast food is given by the bride's family.

The bride then has to cut a fish to cook into a curry.

She grinds all the spices.

After all that she gives everyone a snack and this includes a banana and popcorn most of the time. We also played a few games with her but I can't show you those pictures since all of them have my family in them and I respect their privacy.

I'd like to say a huge congratulations to the newly weds and I wish you the best in life. I can't wait to see the whole family together again for something just as special as this ;)

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Zafira 9/13/15 Zafira 9/13/15

A Month In Bangladesh | Zafira

Hi guys and welcome back to my blog!

So during this summer, me and family headed up to Bangladesh to visit family and to also explore the small South Asian country. For me, this was an eye opening journey as I discovered a lot about Bangladesh, it's traditions and the people there. In all honesty, Bangladesh isn't one of the prettiest places in the world at first but you can see the beauty of the country in the people there. What I loved most about Bangladesh was the amount of pride people had in their country and how much they love it. A majority of the people there don't take anything for granted like many of us do in countries like the UK where important factors of life such as education are handed to us on a plate. Last time I went to Bangladesh was about 7 years ago in 2008, I was too young to understand of how much an important holiday it was and how much things would change when I next came back. Bangladesh was very different this time for me, I focused too much on the minorities and things weren't important such as bugs and the fact that it was about 40 degrees and I was melting . The only thing that should have been important was grasping hold and creating memories of what could be one of the last visits to my somewhat home country. ALTHOUGH I was a major fusspot throughout a big quantity of this holiday, I did create a few memories and on here, I'll share a few with ya ;)

ALSO ALSO ALSO, I'd just like to let you know I didn't use a fancy shmancy camera, I only used my small Canon Powershot A2500. It's not got top notch quality but it took decent pictures and was easy to carry around.

I hope you all had a lovely summer and enjoy my pictures!

I'm really really pleased with how these shots and edits came out. I hope you like them! Make sure you follow me on Instagram and Flickr, I post regularly :)

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Zafira 5/27/15 Zafira 5/27/15

Exploring London: Victoria and Albert Museum | Zafira

Hello and welcome to my blog!

Victoria and Albert Museum is the third part of my London series! It is such a pretty place with a range of different arts and designs. I was very intrigued by everything I saw and it is now one of my favourtie places in London. I highly recommend you to visit whenever you are in London.

To see all my pictures of the V&A Museum, head to my Flickr. The link will be at the end of this post :)