Off the Beaten Track: A Tibetan Wedding in Kathmandu

Tibetan Bride

Tracy Tyson is an American educator living in Nepal, where she trains teachers and helps schools set up Montessori programs. Several years ago, while living in a village near Charikot, she attended a Tibetan wedding on a trip to Kathmandu. This is her account of that experience.

Not long ago, a Tibetan friend in Kathmandu was preparing for her daughter’s wedding and invited me to the festivities, which were to take place at her house. I leaped at the chance to experience this fascinating tradition.

On arrival, my hosts escorted me into the living room, where I was shortly joined by a group of older Tibetans. The women sat cross-legged on the floor, while the men took the couches that stood about the room. Most of these men carried a bottle of either beer or whiskey, which they set down on a low table near one of the couches.

One man, who seemed to be officiating, took up position behind an urn where burning incense scented the air, and a couple of elderly men joined him, one on either side. On the wall behind them hung a poster of Avril Lavigne in a rather Goth outfit. What an image!

After the hosts handed beer around, a toast was made, and everyone received an honorary white scarf, draped around their necks. Next, the men started chanting, much like in a Tibetan monastery, and then the women sang something in response. They repeated this ritual several times.

When they’d finished, the "master of ceremonies" picked up a long leaf, dipped it into an urn that held some kind of liquid, and flicked the leaf toward the guests sitting around the room. He dipped the leaf back in the liquid and put a few drops of it in each person's palm. We all licked the liquid off our palms and smacked our lips with a loud flourish! (It tasted a bit like oil with lemon.)

Next, everyone received a fistful of rice and, after a few words from the MC, threw a bit of rice into the air and shouted "ho!". This ritual repeated three times, and then it was back to the chanting and singing. Later, I learned that the older Tibetans who’d joined me in the living room were elder relatives of the bride and groom, and by licking the liquid and throwing the rice, they were indicating that they had no objections to the match.

Khapsey Wedding Pastries

At one point, the bride and groom came in the room to receive blessings from the assembled elders. The bride wore a traditional Tibetan dress (that wraparound style you see in the movies) and had a woolen shawl draped around her shoulders. Her hair fell down her back in a long braid with a red ribbon interwoven at the end. The groom had on a Nepali-style suit with narrow-legged pants and a suit jacket, and on his head he wore a light-pink turban!

After the marriage ceremony came the reception, held at a Tibetan temple located a 15-minute bus ride from my friend’s house. Here the guests enjoyed course after course of food, along with plenty of beer. The bride and groom sat behind a table at the head of the room, with around 150 guests assembled cross-legged at low tables on the floor.

Interestingly, the bride's mother, my friend, sat on the main floor along with all the other guests and not at the dais with the groom’s relatives (the bride's father lived in the U.S. and wasn't able to attend the wedding). So I took a spot on the floor beside her. She understood little English, and I didn't know the right kind of Nepali to ask questions about what was going on, so the meaning of a lot of what I saw remains a mystery to me! But I did notice an unopened bottle of beer up on the dais with a white scarf draped around its neck, and I wondered if blessing your beer prevented hangovers!

Tibetan Butter Tea

After the first course of the meal, the guests stood up table by table and formed a line. Then each guest approached the bride and groom and draped a white scarf around each of them. They also deposited an envelope filled with money into a big bowl that stood in front of the newlyweds and was decorated with, you guessed it, another big white scarf!

Given the huge number of guests, this took quite a while and periodically, when the volume of the scarves around the necks of the bride and groom threatened to swallow their heads, they were removed to make room for more. (The scarves, not the heads!) The newlyweds apparently received quite a substantial fund to start their married life with!

The Broom-Whipped Bride

Heather Bock is a professional translator working from German into English. She lives in Davis, CA with her German-born husband, their two daughters, and a black lab. Despite 25 years of intimate contact with German culture, she still finds some of their customs to be quite bizarre, such as the predilection for cat fur in the prevention and treatment of back pain.

Perhaps based on their early years playing with dolls and planning Barbie and Ken’s wedding, when their big day comes around many women spend countless hours planning every tiny detail of the wedding—from the color of the flowers, the dresses, the table arrangements, down to the clip in the flower girl’s hair.

Not me.

I guess it’s a good thing I was never like that—I might have been sorely disappointed! Besides, even my active imagination could never have dreamed up what I’d face when I wed at the age of 23: A mountain of broken china, a parade of pastries, a chugging contest, a kidnapping, and having a cord tied around my wrist before being beaten with a broom (OK, it was a symbolic swatting, but still!). And I certainly never thought my husband and I would be among the last to leave the festivities around 4 am, followed by a few die-hard, drunken well-wishers wanting a cup of coffee to wind up our wedding celebration! So let me backtrack and share with you some of the fun customs surrounding my wedding in Germany 20+ years ago…

My husband, Gerhard, comes from a Bavarian town about 20 minutes outside of Nuremberg, and Germany is rich in wedding traditions! About a week before our wedding, we celebrated with a Polterabend—kind of like a bachelor party but for both the bride and groom. Family and friends brought old pottery and smashed it on the ground for good luck. In our case, we were the lucky recipients of literally tons of old dishes (it was weighed when my in-laws had to drive it to the dump). A few relatives even deposited some old toilets and tiles with a certain amount of malicious delight, while another poured out a huge can full of beer caps (NOT an easy thing to sweep off uneven concrete paving!). I’ll never forget clearing away the mountain of shards in the gray drizzle and shoveling it into the trailer hitched up to my my in-laws’ tractor! There’s a German saying, Scherben bringen Glück, or “shards of broken crockery bring you luck” that comes from this tradition, and I assume that the bride and groom tackling this herculean task together is also symbolic of the challenges they will face together in life.

I don’t recall exactly when I learned about the disappearing bride; I think Gerhard took me aside a few days before the wedding and warned me that at some point during the reception, someone would kidnap me (probably a relative or a friend of his brother’s) and take me somewhere, and it would be Gerhard’s task to track me down. And once he found me, he would have to pick up the tab for all the food and drink that might have been consumed while everyone was waiting (it was a kidnapping where anyone was welcome to tag along)! And that is, indeed, what happened, but somehow he’d neglected to mention that after the festivities wound up in the pub, he would tie a cord around my wrist and symbolically “beat” me with a broom! Typisch! Blame the woman for being kidnapped, eh?! But it was all in good fun.

In the States, the bride and groom are the first to leave the reception and head off on their honeymoon, a gentle shower of rice to send them on their way. That is not the case in Germany, where the bride and groom are the last to leave! Our wedding reception kicked off in the early afternoon, after the church ceremony. Gerhard and I were greeted at the door of the pub by a dirndl-clad woman holding a tray with two champagne glasses and a large, old-fashioned key. I quickly realized that it was a chugging contest, and whoever polished off the glass of champagne first would win the symbolic “key” to the household (in other words, would wear the pants in the family!). To this day both my husband and his mom swear that there was a wasp buzzing around his face that put him off his pace, but I say it’s just sour grapes!

Traditional Bavarian music accompanied the wedding feast, provided by my brother-in-law and his oom-pah band. Then came lots of games (including Gerhard being blindfolded and attempting to pick me out of a lineup of women by only feeling our calves!). Germans know how to celebrate a wedding! As midnight—and the obligatory late-night buffet—slipped past and the festivities slowly ebbed towards morning, my husband and I found ourselves walking hand-in-hand back to his childhood home, followed by the last few well-wishers. As we sat in the kitchen, watching his mother make coffee for us all, I felt weary but happy, my head buzzing with the events of the day and the fun we’d had, and I knew that I wouldn’t have had it any other way!