11 Hour Wedding Adventure

We left at 11:30 in the morning, and got back at 10:30 at night. 11 hour wedding. It was very fun.

We get to the church about 20 minutes before the wedding at noon. The church is one of those old Eastern European cathedral type churches. So amazing! (Pictures on Facebook are being uploaded as I type this.) The DTS students and staff are assigned to sit up in the balcony so that we don't disturb anyone with all of the translations that we need to do. The service was in Hungarian, which was translated into Romanian, via a microphone that sent the signal by radio, which you could tune into with any portable radio. You with me so far? Then the Romanians could listen to the translation with their headsets, and translate it to English for anyone that wanted the translation. I wasn't near anyone that was translating into English so I don't know what was being said, but it's a wedding, we all know the words to a wedding.

They sang some worship songs, they had communion, a few assigned people came up and prayed prayers, they read their vows, they read scripture. It was very nice. It took about 3 hours, I think.

Then we all went outside and lined up and congratulated the groom and bride, which didn't take as long as I thought with 200 guests. After that, we hopped into some cabs and drove to the reception.

We were the first ones there, so I got lots of pictures of the set up before everyone arrived. It was very nice. Wine and tulips and appetizers were already waiting for people. We started chowing down on the appetizers. Different meats, different cheeses, a dozen different types of cookies, a tomato, meat balls, chicken, and cake. Okay, I'm full. But those were just the appetizers! We still have 8 hours of food to eat!

In between courses there was dancing. Line dancing, a human tunnel, the macarena, the limbo, a conga line, as well as normal "shake what the Lord gave ya" dancing.

Next course: shredded cabbage with salts and spices and a slice of tomato. I took a couple bites, but was still very full from the appetizers.

Back to dancing. I didn't dance everytime people went out, but I tried to go out a couple times. (I'm sorry, but I can't dance to every single song I hear.)

Next course: Okay, I don't know the real word for this, so let me try to explain it. Imagine a mozzarella stick that is three times as wide as normal. Now stick some slices of ham inside. That's what we ate. It was very good, but I had to restrain myself because it was soooo much cheese. If I eat too much cheese I'll go comatose.

Back to dancing...

This is the point when we tried to "steal the bride." It is a Romanian custom at weddings for some men to kidnap the bride away from the wedding and force the groom to do funny things to get her back. We had talked to Isti (pronounced Ish-tee) beforehand, and he knew we were going to try and do this at some point.

The plan was to distract someone (the groom?) and lead the bride outside into the get away car. I wasn't exactly clear on the details, or why the bride was going to come willingly away from her wedding day. The trouble was that no one had their driver's license on them...except me. :) Hello Mike. Welcome to being a get away driver, a.k.a. the gateway drug to all crime in the world. (P.S. If you want to join my crime syndicate that I'm starting, let me know.)

Two of my friends told me to wait downstairs, so I did. They went off to find the bride. I waited for a few minutes, but they came down and told me that we couldn't steal her right now. Okay, if you say so.

Next course: This is the main course. A chicken leg and wing, pork, potatoes, and rice with gravy. The chicken was soooo good, and the rice with the gravy was sooo good. The pork was pretty good, and the potatoes were pretty good, but neither was amazing enough that I was willing to go in to "gastrointestinal oblivion" to eat them. (If I may coin the phrase of a friend.)

If you guessed more dancing would follow, you'd be right. This was also when we made our second attempt to steal the bride. She was away from the party in the bathroom. Perfect! We head down there and wait for her to come out. When she does, she has a body guard (the bridesmaid), and a cute little girl. We consider stealing all three, but decide against it. We're theives with morals, apparently.

Back to dancing, and talking, and taking photos. A few minutes later we make our third attempt. This time it works and we get the bride outside and start heading for the car, except....ummmm....we can't find it. It's a few degrees above freezing. None of the guys have their jackets, and the girl is in a wedding dress, not the warmest attire. Luckily the car has a remote unlock system that I can keep pressing until we get close enough to make the headlights flash.

We find the car and jump inside. It's a stick. No worries. I know how to drive these. I try to put it into reverse. It doesn't go into reverse. I put it into each of the other five gears to make sure that each of them works. They do. Not reverse. I can't back out of the parking space we're in if we can't go into reverse. Hmmm.

I let my co-pilot try, and he does something and gets it into reverse. Yay! And we're off! I'm officially a get away driver! I wanna drive fast! I wanna break the law! Catch me if you can coppers!! You'll never take me alive!!! But I also want to be careful! We were in Paul's car one day after it came out of the shop. He got in a few wrecks and it took 6 months for the insurance to pay to fix it, and add another week in the shop, and now his car is finally in good shape again. I really really didn't want to wreck it.

We start driving down the road. I ask where we're going, but begin to notice that I can't see my gauges very well. Woops! My lights weren't on! There are street lights and other things, so I can see pretty well, but other cars can't see me very well. I start to look for the lights as non-chalantly as I can without bringing attention to the rest of the passengers that we're driving without our headlights on.

I find the blinkers. I find the windshield wipers. No headlights. Oooo! I found the high beams! But they don't stay on. You have to hold them to get them to stay. I hold them until we pull into a nearby parking lot and talk on the phone with the groom from the wedding. The bride was a good sport about everything and even pretended to scream like she was a real hostage. :)

We sat here for a minute or two. Thankfully, in that minute I found the real lights, and I learned how to put the car into reverse. Just underneath the nob to the manual transmission is a disc. Lift up on the disc and then you can put the car into reverse. I suppose that is so you don't accidentally throw the car into reverse when you're on the road, but is that really a big problem? I don't know the statistics, but are there a lot of drivers that accidentally throw their car into reverse while they're driving down the road? There must be, or car companies wouldn't need to design this safety feature.

So after sitting in the parking lot for a minute we head back. I'm driving kind of slow, but I have a tailgating friend riding my bumper. He drives a bigger car than me, so he probably thinks he could take me in a fight, but he doesn't know that I fight dirty. :-p I keep driving and he pulls into oncoming traffic and speeds around me cutting me off as he gets back into the correct lane. Bye friend! I'll miss you! (I didn't know which font was the most sarcastic, so I just italicised it. :) )

We get back to the wedding and head inside. In order for the groom to get his bride back, he has to sing to her on his knees. The crowd loves it, and from what I heard later (it was in Romanian when he sang it), he didn't know all the words to the song, so he had to make some up.

Then we had more dancing and some cake, which wasn't the best cake in the world, but it was still good enough that I made some room for it in my overstuffed tummy. Then we went home, and I went to bed.