Friends Get Married

I’ve hit that age when everyone you know starts getting married. Some even start having (gasp!) babies! In the last year alone I’ve been to weddings in Serbia, the U.S., Germany, and Paraguay (oh, and there was that time I met my BFF’s baby in the Bahamas.) It’s expensive to keep up with so many friends and their love lives, but it’s also so much fun!

Every country has their traditions – some of them seem weird (actually, no, they ARE weird, but let’s not debate semantics here) but they are all equally as crucial for the couple getting married and for the guests in attendance. Here is a list of some of the things I found to be the strangest, or most unique, in the “foreign weddings” I attended this year:

SERBIA

Vladi and Iva

• The first wedding is in a church (pretty standard) and not all wedding guests are invited to attend – this is usually a small, intimate ceremony that lasts about half an hour – the couple must accept congratulations and smile and pose with every guest who came to the church for the photographer
• When you walk outside the church, there are local gypsy brass bands that come up to the wedding party and play music – their music becomes more insistent the longer they play, often putting the horn of the instrument directly in your ear and playing at full volume until you give them some cash (at this particular wedding the best man also brought the gypsy band to the party, much to the delight of all the guests) – keep in mind, these guys can pull in thousands of dollars a night for a big wedding
• When you arrive to the reception, the couple once again stands outside and poses with every. single. guest. (in this case about 350 people) Only after every guest had their photo op does the party begin.
• Lots and lots of different cakes.
• Oh, and the photographers have printers on hand and walk around the party distributing photos that guests can buy on the spot (this is not so much weird as awesome!)

Gypsy Brass Band

GERMANY

(This was a mixed wedding: half East German half Northern England, i.e. Geordie)

Ali and Neil

• Straight from leaving the church the friends of the bride and groom hold up an old bedsheet which has a giant heart drawn in the middle, and the name of the bride and groom inside of that. The bride and groom are each given a pair of tiny scissors and they must work together to cut the heart shape out. Once complete, the groom then carries the bride through the opening they’ve created in the sheet.
• German tradition is that as the first true test of marriage, the newly wedded couple must work together as a team to saw apart a foot in diameter log using an old school, massive saw. The first marital row, if you will, ensues.
• This might just be East German, not totally sure, but the bride and groom are each given two giant loaves of bread – they must create a pair of shoes from this bread. The first one to walk across the stage (or room) in their new shoes wins!
• Each guest is given a balloon filled with helium and a postcard pre-addressed to the bride and groom. Each guest writes a message to the couple and ties the postcard to the balloon. Everyone releases the balloons at the same time (great photo op!) Once the balloon finally lands (wherever that may be) it’s up to any random stranger passing by who finds it to mail it back to the couple. (Strangely, our postcard made it back to Ali and Neil from the Czech Republic!)

PARAGUAY

(This was a mixed wedding half Paraguayan half Colombian – so the traditions may be a bit mixed up – at least in my mind)

Nati and Luis

• There is a traditional Paraguayan dance at the beginning of the reception and every guest must dance for a few minutes with the bride and groom (men with the bride, women with the groom) and smile for a photo op!
• Ligas – this took me a while to understand! The bride has about 20 garters under her dress (one garter for each single woman at the wedding). One garter is special (i.e. a different color) and the rest are traditional white. The bride sits opposite the single women (one at a time) and they each lift their right leg and touch the souls of the shoes. The groom then takes one garter from the bride’s leg and must slide it across their legs and feet and up the thigh of the single lady. His “last chance to touch another woman” if you will! The woman who gets the colorful garter is the next to marry.
• Masks/hats/whistles/glow sticks/silly string, etc – Boxes of costume-like hats and whistles, (see list above) are distributed to guests to liven things up. I have to admit, this makes the party a hell of a lot more fun!
• Whiskey – easy as that, the drink of choice for the night is whiskey, the nicer the better
• For the Colombian tradition that stood out most, aside from sharing a bottle of whatever they were passing around, is some dance where a woman lies on the floor (or I suppose it could also be a man?) and all the party guests dance feverishly over her. (See example of Mapale here.)

As I continue to grow my international network of friends, I will continue to observe the oddities of culture, which are never more openly displayed than in time-honored traditions such as weddings!

Finding Your True Calling

How many of you have struggled, like I do, to know what it is you “really” want to do? Do you spend days/months/years trying to figure out what your true calling is? Isn’t it possible that maybe there isn’t just one perfect job for everyone, but rather a job or path that allows you to learn, explore, and push yourself harder to achieve.

I spend so much time worrying about whether I am making the right choices, whether I am on the right path, whether or not THIS job will get me where I want to go, that I often forget to take a break and take a look around me. To realize that even if this is not the “perfect” job or the “dream” job – that as long as I am continuing to grow, evolve, and create, it’s pretty damn good for now.

I have long dreamed about working with animals. To me there was no possible way for me to be satisfied in work unless I was working with/helping/talking about animals. So I pushed (and maybe shoved a little) to find my way to this conservation organization where pandas and tigers are our flagship species. And yet, my day-to-day work has nothing to do with animals at all. It’s a bit ironic, but I have to know in my heart that even though I am not out in the field counting Jaguars, I am preventing the destruction of the habitats of those creatures I’ve so longed to protect. Sometimes you just have to take a look around and realize the impact you have, even if it doesn’t feel like “the dream” straight away.

I have a very wise friend who once laid out her view of the different types of jobs one can have; the job you are passionate about, the job that enables you to do the things you want to do on the side, and the job that disables you from living your life while working for “the man”. And in a lot of ways, I think she is right. It’s a matter of knowing where you are in your career and what you want for the road ahead before you can realize the benefits of the job you are currently in (or, in some cases the drawbacks.)

What is your dream job? And how many of you are actually in it?