ireland, part 4: everyone should celebrate weddings the way the irish do

First things first -- this is my 2nd post today so if you are a LOST fan, scroll down or click here to read my thoughts about last night's episode.

Anyway. More Ireland stuff! I am giving up on trying to format posts with text after/in-between photos, because either it looks terrible in Firefox or there are huge gaps in Internet Explorer. I can't find a solution other than getting a new blog template, so I've added that to my list of things to do. In the meantime I'll just write at the top and post pictures at the bottom and leave it at that.

Mitra & Mairtin got married New Year's Eve in a pretty chapel at the university where they met. It was a beautiful wedding, and started off with Mairtin surprising Mitra by singing her favorite Irish song while she walked down the aisle. Interestingly, there were two similarities between her wedding and mine, which were by total coincidence, since she wasn't able to come to my wedding. The Apache Prayer was read (Sandi Lynn, my cousin/godmother, read it at mine) and the song Give Me Your Hand was sung (the brass quintet played this at my wedding, an arrangement done for me by my former college professor). So that was kind of neat.

The wedding was a traditional Irish wedding (we'll talk about that in a minute) but also included a beautiful tribute to Mitra's Persian heritage, with a Persian wedding table (pictured below). The table was at the reception, where they finished their ceremony by lighting the unity candle there.

In Ireland, weddings are a true celebration! Nobody over there can believe we Americans end weddings at 10 or 11 at night. They are just getting started. When you rent a hall/hotel there, it's yours for the night. The reception went from 7:00pm to 6:00am the next morning, and was filled with good food, drink, toasts and celebration, plenty of Irish music and singing and dancing, and disco (American music & dancing). Mairtin, two of his brothers and their dad did a brush dance, which was really neat.

We also rang in the new year, on top of everything else! The wedding was a big celebration and definitely the coolest way I've ever welcomed a new year. And we got to celebrate the new year 5 hours ahead of everyone back home. We stayed with the party all night and arrived back at the house at 6:00am for a quick snack before crashing into bed.
















1 comments:

Elena said...

This seems like such a great time!

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