Wedding (no, not mine)

I'm pretty sure my only readers are currently on their honeymoon ;), but I'm going to jot down my thoughts on the whole wedding madness of the past week while they're still fresh.

For those who stumbled on this blog, my sister got married this past weekend - the main ceremony taking place on Saturday afternoon, with various ceremonies and parties happening both before and after, all culminating with a grand reception on Saturday night (and a smaller after-party at the hotel where the couple's friends were staying).

Overall, the events (the music party on Friday and the wedding/reception on Saturday) went very well. There were many, many reasons and wild cards that could have made them a disaster, but everything turned out great.

We were very skeptical about our decorator since she didn't speak English very well and was terrible at returning our calls and emails. However, her work spoke for itself - her crew was the first to arrive at both the music party and on Saturday, and the decorations were far more beautiful than we had imagined.

The agenda for the music party had changed several times during the week - with pretty much every family member out of the 17 staying at home having an opinion on how things should go. Luckily, my uncle (my mom's sister's husband who flew in from India) was a very entertaining MC and we had some great dances, songs, poems, and musical performances. I think the only thing that we could have done better was to hire a professional DJ - our 'open dance' was a collection of songs that can be danceable, but only at certain parts of the songs. Being a DJ is a lot harder than it looks.

The wedding ceremony on Saturday was flawless. We asked our family friend from Austin to conduct the ceremony - he became a priest after retiring and has done hundreds of weddings for the Austin Indian community. He's great because he explains each step in English and is also very entertaining and funny. Although I didn't have an actual seat on the mandap, I feel like I was up there for most of the ceremony.

The reception went pretty well also, despite a few hiccups. There were some emotional speeches, an awe-inspiring musical piece by my cousins from Amsterdam who are professional musicians, a fun game devised by my sister's best friend, and some great dances (one by my aunt from London, who's a professional dancer).

I'm a little upset that the DJ messed up on the slideshow - the video was fine, but for some reason, you could barely hear the audio. My sister said she could hear it just fine, but some people later mentioned they couldn't hear it in the back. I was pretty shocked how many compliments I got for the cheesy dance I did with my cousin. We didn't have a chance to practice much with everything else going on, and I honestly don't think I did that great of a job - but I'm glad everyone else enjoyed it so much!

It's definitely been an exhausting week, but I'm happy that all the events went smoothly. Everyone seemed to have a great time, and I'm not aware of any major drama.

I have 2 major takeaways: 1) it's way better to elope than to go through this wedding madness, 2) I will not miss hearing my name being called every 5 minutes for a week.