Weddings

Weddings are fun... and its good that I think so, cause I've got a few lined up this summer. Today marked the first in the series, it was my cousin (or second cousin of some sort) Amanda's wedding to a Peruvian man named Omar. So, because his family from Peru flew in for the wedding, the service was done in both Spanish and English. It was pretty cool. I could even pick out a few words here and there that I remembered from elementary school or Sesame Street or something.

The coolest thing about the wedding though, was seeing all the cousins (or second cousins) from my dad's side of the family. We used to have cousin parties at Christmas every year, and all of us cousins who hardly knew each other would attempt to play together. Well, I think we should start them up again, because I have some cool cousins, and now I'm actually old enough to really enjoy talking to them.

The wedding also had some of the best wedding music I've ever heard. They hired a band that played Peruvian music, which is Latin sounding, but not salsa. And the Peruvian family was very into dancing. Omar kept standing up and saying into the microphone, "this is a good Peruvian song, and everyone has to dance." He would then grab hands, one male, one female, and partner people up, no matter if you had no idea how to dance Peruvian. Somehow he had faith that you'd figure it out, and usually, because the songs were a good 15 minutes long, you did have time to at least catch on to something before the end.

I danced once dance with Omar's best man, who shortly traded me off to another of Omar's friends. He was a great dancer, but English was not his forte. Over the course of the 15 minute song, we established that his name was Carlos, mine was Maren, and that no further conversation was going to be possible, no matter what kind of communication we tried. At least I got a good dance out of it... and I reminded myself just how much I love to salsa dance....

Off to rent Dirty Dancing, Havana Nights....