This Monday

Ivana and Dinu's wedding #2: Getting Ready

(I have many pictures to share. These are only some of them, and I apologize if they seem a little random. Please remember you can click on them to enlarge them. )

Ivana and Dinu wanted a small wedding to celebrate their marriage, and decided to have it in Ivana's childhood home in Orange County. Therefore, Americans, Serbians and Moldovans began arriving at Nemanja's parents house a few days before the wedding. While you might think that planning a wedding essentially a week and a half would be a little hectic, or people would be generally freaking out. But, honestly, everyone was a perfectly reasonable level of paniced. I was amazed.

They rented tables and chairs, and an arch for the backyard. On Friday, they picked up tons of roses at Costco. Tiffany, Ivana's friend extraordinaire, was in charge of floral arrangments. She made the bouquets, centerpieces, flowers for the arch, and flowers for the guys. She was amazing. The picture to the right was the flower making factory in the garage.

Nemanja's mother did all the cooking, while Nemanja's mother's cousin made the wedding cake (pictured in its initial stages). When I arrived, it was Friday night, and everyone was enjoying talking to each other and generally, people were very relaxed, although I think Tiffany was still in the garage working the whole time. We all sat down for dinner together the night before the wedding.
We had borscht, which I really like. At this point I think we were at a head count of 3 americans, 5 serbians, and 4 Moldovans. I am still not sure where everyone ended up sleeping!

The day of the wedding, we all got up. I'm not sure what everyone else's day was like, but I had breakfast, and then sort of sat around trying to figure out what errands needed to be run. In the end, I went to the dry cleaners with Nemanja, Dinu, and Vlad (Dinu's friend from back home who lives in NY) to the dry cleaners (1 hour dry cleaning to get suits pressed) and RadioShack (to get the speaker system up to par) and Thrify (Vlad and I wanted to buy sunglasses, and since we were here anyway...) We headed back to the house, and since about 10 of us were in the house already, we all to turns showering. We also had lunch, around 3 pm, since dinner wasn't planned until 8pm that night.

The food preparation had begun by Nemanja's mom really early in the morning. When I joined in the food prep party, then men were cutting the carrots, and I was spreading cream cheese on toast. The arch had been moved into the backyard, and Tiffany was still in the process of decorating it.

The flowers were moved inside, and the candles were placed throughout the house. We started cleaning the last bit of the house, and then around 3:30, I started getting ready, since guest were coming at 4pm. Sometime around then, the photographer showed up, and Ivana started getting her hair done by her mom's cousin. Then, guests started to arrive, and I got ready.

posted by This Monday Morning @ 3:39 PM