Congratulations me! My wedding went off without a relative hitch on 23rd September (nearly 4 weeks ago, I know), and I've finally gotten round to putting up some photos.Actually there should be a ton of better ones that H's uncle took with a real camera, but we haven't seen those pictures yet. More specifically we got to be in the same room as the photos when they were being shown around but were so busy simultaneously interpreting multiple conversations for the entire evening that we never got a chance to give them more than a very brief passing glance. Or to eat.
That was how it was for much of the time around the wedding, as my parents, brother, and his wife had come to stay for a couple of weeks. Not that we weren't glad to have them over, but the excrutiatingly hectic wedding day was probably the only time we got to breathe.
So yeah, the wedding. The main part took place in an ancient temple called Igusa-Hachiman which is near to Kichijoji - it felt right that we should do a Shinto wedding given our surname. That went well, especially given that none of us had the faintest clue what was going on. All a lot of waving dusters over our heads, playing the flute really loudly, spinning branches round and drinking sake. Despite being a very picturesque shrine in an even more picturesque setting, most of the photos seem to be taken against the most uninteresting background there. Not intentional really - a mate and his wife had turned up late, so we went to speak to them straight after the ceremony and while we were standing there everybody just started taking pictures, so there wasn't a lot we could do really.
The Hakama I wore incidentally was about 85 years old and belonged to H's great grandfather. It felt very heavy from the peering eyes of her ancestors. H's costume was a rental and was just heavy period, such that it made it extremely difficult to walk. Or stand. The wig made it very top heavy too.
Speeding onto the reception, we were both now changed into costumes we found much more suitably comfortable. Superb Italian food, and a rather amusing speech in English from the dad in law remain fixed in my mind despite the rest being a blur.
The post-reception party at an English themed pub followed, with an interesting take on the bouquet toss (each single girl must give a short speech to convince us why she should receive the bouquet, and some were quite imaginative) and free Guinness for a couple of hours. Finally a few hours of all you can drink karaoke finished the night off on the right tone, and in some cases, tone deaf.
As anybody that's been wondering why I rarely get to update this blog will be aware, it's been a busy year what with buying a house and organising the wedding. The plan was that once the wedding was over, family has gone home etc. things would settle down and we could start getting on with all those little things that we never had a chance to do. Fat chance. My office decided to move which meant a public holiday weekend spent shifting stuff, and all this at the busiest time of year projectwise so I haven't been getting home til late each night. Add to that that H hasn't been well, so I've had that to worry about too (though not so bad that she hasn't been able to make my lunch every morning!!!!). So in the last 4 weeks I've successfully got absolutely nothing done.To make sure I don't forget though, here's what's in the pipeline.
- Wedding video - we got a load of really good footage from H's brother in law, but it's not really presentable in its current form. I want to edit that down to about 10 minutes if I can, and subtitle some of it in English. Even if I do a quick job (which is exactly what I plan to), this is going to take several hours, several hours of which I don't have.
- A bunch of other stuff, small things, that should have been done ages ago. Still haven't finished notifying all the banks and things about the address change from two months ago...
Maybe soon eh!
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