Wedding¶
986 words
It was my colleague’s wedding yesterday. So it was time to dress up a little, practice the old tie knots – worth mentioning because I have more fingers than I’d need to count the occasions where I needed to do that before…
thanks to moving in the unfashionable world of mathematics – and I even managed to get a nice wide one on the third attempt or so. Then it was off to see the ceremony at church. Which I found very strange. It’s not that the couple are churchgoers or anything. So it was probably mostly done for the white dress, the families, tradition and so on. Things that I fail to understand.
And which I find difficult to deal with. Of course I can go and sit around in a church for my friends. But then things start being tricky. They want to sing songs. Not that I’m good at or fond of singing (other than that while driving a car), but I could just do that if it weren’t for the ideologically coloured lyrics with all that god stuff in there. If I am to sing that, I can’t be sincere about it. So I’ll just be taking the piss. Which in turn won’t be nice of me. So, whichever way you put it, I’ll be rude to my friends. Either by not joining the singing or by taking the piss. Tough one.
While everybody quite liked the priest guy, I wasn’t too happy with him. Not only did he look bored while sitting at the side and singing, he also seemed to guess that large parts of the audience might not be into the whole church thing. And thus, it seemed to me, that he went at great lengths to include extra explanations of how the whole christianity and god things made love and marriage much better and more worthwhile. Which I considered quite pointless. If people go all the way to get married in church, they shouldn’t need that kind of reminder. And trying to convince everybody else – apart from possibly being futile – just isn’t what the occasion was for.
After the church thing was finished, I quickly had to tie a tie for my boss and then we were in for photos. The weather was quite bad this weekend, and so we were quite lucky that it didn’t rain at the time when everybody was standing outside, waiting to be photographed. It soon became apparent, that the photographer they hired must have come straight from hell. While her method did work, many people found her very rude and pushy. Ordering people around to the right places by calling them names along the lines of ‘old guy’, ‘blonde chick’ and so on, isn’t exactly what I expected. After taking the gazillions of photos of all the guests, the families, the parents, the siblings, andsoon andsoon, she went on to chase the couple half across town to take photos of them about everywhere. While we had a coffee, the couple became quite exhausted by this. Finally I’m not quite sure about the photographer’s technical proficiency. Let’s just say, that I hadn’t expected a ‘pro’ to use her camera’s flip open flash when taking photos outside and from a distance of at least ten metres. But what do i know?
Later on there was a reception and party with a large buffett of food. That was quite good. At least one of the salads – a rucola and fried chicken kind of affair – was very good and many of the other things were nice as well. And whenever you are offered ‘orange tiramisu’, you should simply decline. You wouldn’t even need to be polite about it.
Throughout the evening there were more things going on. Some people had prepared fun games and presents. One of which was that they had prepared sheets with questions on them and everyone who could answer a question with ‘yes’ had to get up. The bride and groom couldn’t see the questions and had to figure it out by looking at who got up and who remained seated. That was fun. And they were surprisingly good at finding out the questions!
In between all that we could chat with the people at our tables and consume numerous drinks. One of them was the Bullenschluck from my colleague’s home town. In many small towns it seems that the pharmacist came up with some herb liqueur and it’s one of those. But it tastes much less gross than many of the others. And apparently it’s also quite good at appeasing your stomach after too much food.
And to finish off with a complaint – the music at the party was atrocious. It was supposed to be for dancing. And those people who were keen to dance did recognise their disco-foxes and other rhythms. But can’t they pack those in decent music? Does it need to be crappy 80s synthy trash pop? No music from the last decade, about three songs from the 60s in between which were the highlight and some song by ABBA which stood out for it’s creative brilliance. Ugh. I don’t get it. Why are the people running such events such morons. Why doesn’t anybody else care about music? While I hadn’t expected them to play Hotel Yorba – with its wedding related lyrics – when playing a waltz for the bride and groom to open the dancefloor, shouldn’t they have used something moderately classy. Like proper music with a classical orchestra or something? I would have thought so. But the experts preferred 80s junk pop of course… ugh.
After getting home late, I had a few hours of sleep, and then indulged in a day of helping a friend move, ordering a computer, doing some statistics with my brother, seeing Charlie and the Chocolate factory, choosing a new flatmate and celebrating a flatmate’s birthday. Time passes quickly like that.
