Hindu believes life consists of 5 basic elements which are water, earth, sky, fire, and wind. So, in the Hindu wedding, there are 5 ceremonies worshiping these elements.
At the end, when groom is supposed to give sacred neclace to bride both of them walk around this fire for 7 times('cause in earlier days only 7 planets in solar system were considered) and Fire represents Sun source of energy. It's like keeping all of them as wintnesses and then they promise to support each other forever and ask for their blessings in the journey thereafter.

At 1:00 pm we reached Bangalore after more than 3 hrs delay. We were planning to catch the direct train at 11 am to Mysore ,but this new conditions forced us to cancel our booking and look for another possible solution. However, finding a solution was just a beautiful dream! Bangalore was unexpectedly different from what we expected from Silicon valley of India. In comparison with Singapore Airport, Bangalore Airport was a very old and dirty place like a common building in the poor parts of the city. I wish the story was just that but it became worse in the entrance of arrival hall where the police was trying to control the crowd not to rush in.
The first impression was awful. Cows and bulls roaming the roads and sick skinny dogs lying down the street, a very dirty area full of homeless people... For the first 10 minutes, I was sticking my backpack and doing nothing except shaking! After complaining the Indian airline duty manager for such this trouble and long delay, they offered a taxi to take us to Majestic Railway station to check the availability of train tickets for Mysore . After a long journey to railway station, standing in a very long queue, we found two tickets for 4:30 pm which was planned to reach Mysore at 10:00 pm! 139km in 5:30 hrs! It was awful and obviously out of our patience. So, we canceled our plan to Mysore .
Since we had booked a hotel in Mysore for that night, we didn't have any idea about accommodation in Bangalore . So, I called my friend and asked about a good hotel to stay for night. Getting an ambassador (Indian old Benz) for 200 Rps, We asked the driver to take us to BRAS PRASHANTHA Hotel. Atoosa got down checking the hotel first but it was really under our imagination. Terribly dark for us! So, there was no way except trusting the driver and asking him to take us to a reasonable good hotel. On the way while we were really frightened and we didn't have any other way except trusting, we called our friend in Singapore by our Singapore mobile, gave him the car number, the story and funnily mentioned "if we wouldn't call you back again in 15 minutes, consider us dead!"
Finally, we were lucky to find a not too bad hotel, GOLDEN RESIDENCY HOTEL. After putting down our luggage, we went for walking around and seeing the night life of Bangalore . Besides, eagerly we were looking for mineral water and at least some biscuits to survive!
Hearding about McDonald in Bangalore , we first asked for it from a restaurant. But his reaction was funny. He showed us his menu and replied " we are not serving McDonald. Here is our menu, which of them do you mean!!!!" Funnier was the reaction of people for asking for supermarket. It was a totally strange concept to the people of that area. Finally, after around 1 hour browsing we just found mineral water and some bananas and oranges for dinner. After coming back to the hotel, we called the same driver to hire him for one day sightseeing in Bangalore. It was the first day in India . For the whole day I was totally shocked and so scared for this unbelievable first impression and I hope later days would not be as heavy as today :)

Bangalore, 25th January, 2006