What a Beautiful Wedding

The wedding was terrific. It was a great privilege to be in attendance.

From lunch forward, the day was full of ceremonies, and FOOD. I can't believe how completely stuffed I am. I had 5 solid meals yesterday. I think the one reason I'm not either dead or in a much bigger world of pain is that everything is vegetarian. The spreads are unbelievable. I think what they did was take a dictionary of Indian food, cross off about 4 items and make everything else (plus a good selection of other ethnic foods). Yesterday we had breakfast and lunch. Full on. Then High Tea was at 4:30. If you thought there would just be tea here, then you are dead wrong, my friends. The spread at high tea was about 200 feet long with at least 35 staffers behind the tables. I'm serious, 5 meals. This is just high tea, don't forget to save room for Dinner 1 and Dinner 2. And other guests(strangers) do not hesitate to come around and ask if you've gotten anything to eat. I heard at least a dozen people, including Max Benjamin, vow to not eat for three days, but I was back at the breakfast buffet at 10am today as usual. I couldn't help but think that because the father of the bride runs a company with ~1300 employees that this was an especially large and fancy wedding, but everyone seemed to say all this was normal.

The ceremonies were nice, and plentiful. We started with the wrapping of the headdress on the groom. Before this, most of the men, including myself, had our heads dressed as well. I don't know the name of the item, but it was about a yard wide and about seven long, intricately wrapped and knotted. Groom then goes outside for a little parade where he's up on a white horse. Then he gets in a long, fancy antique car with his family and drives off. Then we all move back inside for high tea. It really goes on and on from 3pm to midnight.

During a bit of break I sat in a Hold Em cash game and won 500 Rp.

I took a few photos during the day. I shot with no flash with my junky Rebel xTi. Despite a little blur sometimes and plenty of high-ISO grain, I like the way the pictures came out. I like to make the photos look how the event looked. I think that helps bring back the emotion of the day. Fortunately at this event, the videographers had very bright lights attached to their cameras and this helped out my settings a lot of the time.

Here's a couple I liked. Don't forget to view these suckers large.


Probably tomorrow I will be leaving this 5-start air conditioned world to get out into the country. I'm still pretty nervous about India, but that's ok. I'm working on my head-wobble and will continue the ongoing challenge of trying to figure out what it means. For instance, to the man sleepily supervising the infinite tasks of creating marigold strings for the wedding, 'may i take your picture?', head wobble, me thinking: uhhhhhhhhhhh? I'm gonna err on the safe side and stroll away. Later, I came back and take a picture of him while I thought he was sleeping. The shutter woke him up and he head wobbled again a little more enthusiastically, and with a bit of a smile. I read this head wobble as photos are ok and made another portrait which I liked. Not sure when the next post will be.

Note and apology: I just changed a setting so anyone should be able to comment now. If you have no account, it will just post as anonymous. I just had to make a couple easy clicks and I should've done it a while ago.

Namaste.