Wedding Weekend

This Memorial Day weekend was great fun, leaving Friday for Long Island to attend the wedding of one of my oldest friends.  Normally, travelling to and from Long Island from D.C. on Memorial Day weekend would mean stabby rage, but instead of going by car we were fortunate enough to catch a ride with some friends in their private plane.  Shrimp cocktail and champagne for a 45 minute jaunt instead of 12 hours each way?  Yes, please!

We also treated ourselves by staying at the hotel where the wedding was to be held, in what turned out to be a recreated chateau.  This was also my first full-scale Persian wedding, which meant the following:

1) Extremely large number of guests--closer to 400 than 300.  In fact, the rehearsal dinner crowd alone was larger than the wedding crowd for any wedding I've ever attended.

2) Intense amounts of food.  The cocktail hour(s) alone featured great food in abundance (raw bars, caviar, roast lamb) plus plenty of top notch alchohol.

3) For a non-drinker (for this year) it was incredibly difficult to refrain from having drinks--they had a lot of interesting things I hadn't seen before, including vodka infused with various fruits and spices.

4) There was a great deal of dancing, both for the rehearsal dinner and the wedding reception.  By this I mean dancing started at the very beginning (during the salad courses) and continued all the way through.  This crowd partied well through the night.

5) Exhaustion is the only thing that eventually slows you down, and even the older guests have a great deal of stamina.

In all, it was a terrific time and great to see my friend join the ranks of the married folks.  Returning Sunday, we managed to be back early enough to catch a BBQ with some friends and wind down a bit before coming into another week.