A new wedding crashing Strategy...

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Saturday I discovered a new way to crash weddings- just stand by the photographers the entire time and pretend like I'm one of them.

Since the Catholic church has lots of rules about where and when you can take pictures, someone suggested I just follow the lead of the photographers. They then offered to take me to the reception, which I was pretty excited about, since before I was just planning on going to the ceremony.

The 2:00 wedding got rolling somewhere after 2:30, very typical of Trini time. In an effort to overcome Trini time, the churches have started charging about $150-200 if you start more than 15 minutes late...but instead the brides just consider that to be a donation to the church and come whenever they like. Since I was suddenly part of the photographer posse, that involved going to take all the pictures of the bridal party between the wedding an the reception which turned out to be quite the ordeal.

More exciting than being at the reception for my "research" purposes, was the fact that I got all kinds of free food. There were hors d'ouvres when we arrived, beverages galore and a full buffet dinner and dessert. The odd thing about this wedding was that the reception was at an oil refinery. I was a little confused at how this was a nice location when we pulled in, since the looks and smell of the place were lacking...but there was a pretty nice club house. Apparently since the oil companies, the main industry here, are rolling in money, they build gated communities inside the refineries with club houses, pools, golf courses and the like for all their employees.

I realized about an hour into the reception, once my food was settling, that receptions for people who you don't know at all are really incredibly boring. There was nothing that special about this wedding from any other wedding I've been to at home, and after about the 13th toast I was ready to go jump in the pool. But instead, I was the white girl who sat in the corner giggling to myself about various happenings of the day. Such as:

-As soon as we got in the church, there was one other white person, presumably a Trinidadian or at least not a tourist, yet Clerene yelled out "LOOK Erin there IS someone else like you!" They also call me the white family member.

-There was this one guy at the wedding who was super excited to be taking pictures with his disposable camera. The thing was, is that he took EVERY single picture with the camera backwards. He is going to get back 25 pictures of his nose. And I didn't have the heart to tell him either. But that's because I'm a terrible person.

-The camera man driving listened exclusively to 101.1, Radio for Women. He jammed loudly to bad American 80's dance music and confessed that it was his favorite music of all time. His cohort sat in the back seat ashamed.

So sometime around 9 they had finished all their film and we were able to return home. I was supposed to go lime, or go clubbing if you like, with the 33 year old neighbor who I would have guessed was about 17- by looks, behavior and the fact that she has never really worked at lives at home...but that is a whole other story. Luckily, the moral of this story is that I claimed exhaustion and was able to make my 9:30 bedtime only a little late. Maybe next time.

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Photos

being SO careful not to step on the train
he was incredibly cute, and did this the whole way down the aisle.

Football really does run the country.
That and oil. But I've been told by more than one person that weddings in June aren't happening because of the world cup.