Today my friends Alena and Kersten got married.  I always knew Alena would have a pretty big wedding, but I didn't expect the hundreds of people that were to arrive.  We spent the first half of the day in Snook, Texas (a friendly place... as the sign says) setting up for the reception.  I love this little town.  It has its own post office and bank (the First Bank of Snook!).  We doubled the population of Snook with Alena's wedding reception.

The second half of the day was about the wedding.  I did my best to stay out of the way.  There are some people that are really into weddings, I'm not one of them.  I just wanted to watch my friends get married, and talk to the people there I knew.  There were people there who I had never met who were into weddings.  The flower girl's mom for example.  I got a few "who are you?" looks from her when I took pictures of Alena.  She freaked out when her camera ran out of batteries when her daughter was posing with the bride.  When I told her that Adriana and I were Alena's friends from college and both teachers she said, "wow, you really have to love children to be a teacher", A and I both had to contain our laughter.   Time to leave them to their business and go for a drive.

Alena has the strangest sign on her street that we passed by several times:

Jesus!  Talk about inclusion... I would hate to be the child that has this in front of their house.  How am I supposed to drive differently knowing there's an autistic child around?

Back at Alena's house it was almost time for the wedding.  All the family and distant relatives were there.  Alena looked gorgeous as usual.  I think she looks just as pretty in her wedding dress as she does in blue jeans and flip flops though.  The wedding ceremony was interesting... half in german, half in english.  I didn't think I'd cry, but I did.  I'm more sentimental than I thought. 

Afterwards we went to the reception where everybody was there besides us, everyone anxious for bbq catered by Czech-Tex, which was obvious from the empty plate of appetizers.  I sat down at a table with Kersten's relatives.  I don't speak much german (except what I learned on a Lufthansa flight) and they don't speak much english, so that was a bit strange, but despite the language differences we got along fine.  Kersten's uncle Heinz kept speaking to me in german really slowly and loudly which was pretty funny.  I pretended to understand as best I could because I found it endearing that he wanted to communicate with me at all.  We talked about the food in Britain a little bit, then I just kept bringing them beer.  Paulaner? It was a really fun wedding reception.  It helped that I didn't know many people there.  It wasn't embarrassing to get up and dance the chicken dance, or to waltz across texas.

Adriana and I pulled "fortune charms" out of the cake.  I got love, and she got money, so we traded.  I think it was a fair trade.