The Van

So our van arrived a few days ago but the driver we were hoping to go with (Manjunath) for those of you that met him didn't work out. He was charging us Palm Meadow prices so we decided to find someone else. In the meantime, our van (Toyota Innova) was sitting in our driveway for a few days since neither one of us was willing to drive. Luckily, Prasad's friend, Sanjay had a driver whose brother was looking for a driver position so we decided to give him a shot and try him out for a few weeks. In honour of our first day out in our new van, we decided to go to the temple. We have never done this for any of our other cars but we thought we should for this one. When we entered the temple, I had taken off my shoes but once the pujari started the "van puja", we had to go into parking area. I was out of my comfort zone of "not wearing shoes" so I asked Prasad if it was ok if I kept mine on. He "ofcourse" said it was fine but when the priest started the puja, he told me to take off my shoes. For those of you that know me, I'm very squeamish about bugs, dirt,etc.. so this was not something I wanted to do but did I really want to offend the priest. Anyway, we started with the puja and I must admit I found it a bit odd to be worshipping a van but we did it. The priest was more comfortable speaking in Kannada so he got our driver to do most of the rituals which was great because I wasn't about to break a coconut (it took me 3 -4tries at our gruha pravesam with Amma) nor was I going to put 4 lemons below the tires, who knows what would be under the tires. We're supposed to drive over the lemons as part of the puja. At the end the priest did a final prayer and asked Sindhura and Rushil's nakshatra which we didn't know, I could barely remember mine and I'm not a 100% it's the right one. It didn't help that the kids were scared to put their hands on the harathi and they didn't know that they should take the prasadam with their right hand. I guess everyone knew that we obviously didn't take our kids to enough temple visits :-) All in all it was a success and we ended our first day with the van at Dominos Pizza. Now we need to start planning all those weekend visits as this is reason we convinced ourselves to get a van instead of a smaller car.