Dress Shopping

I've been invited to the Marine Ball! It'll be my first ball, so I searched and searched for a dress I thought would be reusable... er, wait, I mean "timeless" and "classy." I found the dress at right on the Neiman Marcus website for $5k. A bit out of my price range, so I instead decided to attempt a tailor in town.

Luckily my friends Tom and Danny are also taking dates, and as they needed tuxedos, I accompanied them to the souk last night. The souk is like a large market area where you can get just about anything! TONS of fabric stores, food, spices, jewelry - they have a large area called the Gold Souk. The streets are narrow and filled with wares pouring out from inside the little shops. Most shops don't have a/c, thus the workers stand outside attempting to grab business.

The guys were easy enough to shop for - they just pointed to what they wanted, the tailor took a few measurements, and they were done. For me, not so easy. It was hard to find a ladies shop - but luckily we ran into a Navy girl we know who was on the same mission. She took us to her tailor, and I bought the 7 meters of black fabric needed - it's just shiny black fabric, not as glamorous as I was hoping, but still nice. They had TONS of fabrics to chose from, but it was far to difficult to decide on my toes.

After I purchased the fabric we went upstairs to the tailor - he had his little sweatshop of 3 people. He was an old, short, chubby Indian man who was probably all of 4 feet tall. He took me into his back room for measurements ... and then he started adjusting the girls.

No major groping took place - just movement of bra straps to make sure everything was as it should be... but I wasn't quite prepared for it, so I giggled. He took about 30 measurements of my body and told me exactly where things would fall, how the straps would look, and so I was happy. Then he reached the topic of a built in bra and asked, "would you like bra, or you wear one?"
"Oh, I'd prefer it be built in please," I replied.
"Ok" he said "I give you bra and little bit of padding"
"Could we make it a lot of padding? I'd like to look good!"
He stopped, looked at me very intently and said "you know you are perfect yes? Very beautiful, you believe me, yes? YES?!"
Um... sure. "yes yes, I know!" I quickly replied, and then I think I saw this serious little old man blush. Awww. He has a crush! hahaha!

Total, fabric plus labor the (perfectly fitted) dress will run about $120. Not too shabby!