Cartagena Wedding (2)

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The big day of the wedding then arrived. We both had an easy morning getting massages, before Patty headed off to the hotel to get her hair and makeup done. As the ceremony was late afternoon, we decided that rather than try and fit in the photos between the ceremony and the reception, we would get them out of the way before the ceremony. This then gave us more time with our guests and also allowed us to take advantage of the day light hours and take photos around the gorgeous old city before it got dark. This meant I got to see the bride before the ceremony, but oh well! After running about the old city taking photos for a couple of hours, we dashed back to the hotel to cool off for 20 minutes, and then I headed down to the hotel courtyard, where we were having the ceremony, to wait for Patty.

Anecdote: We had a few hiccups on our wedding day. We had organised a 4 piece band to provide the music for the ceremony. Patty had also organised for one of her friends, Maca, to sing a song as she came down the isle. We had planned to start the ceremony at 5pm on the dot, however as is pretty typical with Patty, we were running a little late. This ended up being quite fortunate as we found out later, as the only road to the old city had been closed for a marathon, and our band (and a number of wedding guests) couldn’t get to the wedding on time! The band finally made it to the hotel around 5:20pm to find a super stressed Maca, as she had no chance to rehearse the wedding song with them. Patty and I were completely oblivious to all this as we were still getting ready. About the only question mark I had at this time was why the band wasn’t playing any background music, as we had organised with them to begin this at 4:45pm as the guests arrived. It was only later in the night that I found out about the dramas with the band and some of the guests getting to the wedding. The end result was the ceremony commenced around 5:30pm without any further hitches.

We had organised Patty’s uncle, Sergio, to be the celebrant for the wedding, as he was fluent in both Spanish and English. We had also officially been married in Australia before we left on our world trip, so there was no paperwork or formal stuff that we needed to do in Colombia. The wedding here was simply a celebration of our marriage to each other. The ceremony was quite short, with Sergio giving a brief recount of how Patty and I had met, and our years together leading up to the wedding. We also had my sister Clair, and Patty’s brother Federico, give a reading of their choice. What was amazing was that they both independently picked the identical reading to give! So this made it easy for us, as Federico read the Spanish version and Clair read the English version; no translations required! I thought the wedding was going to degenerate into a cry fest for a little while, as Clair got a little emotional during her reading, which then got both Patty and I straining to hold back the tears, and I suspect quite a few of the other guests. It was then Patty and my turn to read our vows, which went surprisingly smoothly, considering we were both doing them in both English and Spanish, and my Spanish was definitely nowhere near the level I had wanted it to be after our travels, and I was quite nervous. I managed to stutter and stumble my way through them though, and the Colombian contingent seemed to understand them without a problem, and gave me some kind applause, so I was able to relax after this and enjoy the evening.

After the short ceremony, we all headed up to pool deck on the top floor of the hotel, where we had a cocktail hour and got to enjoy the sunset over the old city and the ocean. We then headed back down to the hotel’s chapel, where we had the dinner, speeches and a great party.

It ended up being a little embarrassing for Patty and I when we first entered the chapel to sit down at our table. We had organised our brothers and sisters and their partners to be sitting at our table. The only problem was that when we made our grand entrance to the chapel to sit down, expecting everyone to be seated, we ended up being the only ones at our table. Unbeknownst to us, my sister Clair and Justin (her husband) had headed off after the cocktail hour to put Sam (my 12 month nephew) to bed; Patty’s brother’s 2 year old son had become sick and so he was off nursing him, and Patty’s sister Paula, Francisco (her partner), and Ana (her step sister), all heavy smokers, were outside having a cigarette!

The reception was a wonderful party, with everyone having a great time. At various points through the night, we had a number of surprises for our guests. The best of these was the “crazy hour”, where we handed out masks to all the guests and had a group of 20 dancers, dressed in carnival costumes come and entertain and dance with everyone. By this time, we had also given all the girls a set of thongs each so they could get out of their high heels and really let loose on the dance floor!

Anecdote: Patty was her usual energetic, hyperactive self throughout the wedding. She also had her fair share of incidents through the night. The first of these was while strutting her stuff on the dance floor, someone’s high heel accidently stepped on her wedding dress and ripped a large whole in the bottom of it. Rather than break down in tears like a typical bride might, Patty just grabbed a table knife from a nearby table and proceeded to cut away the damaged section of the dress so that it wouldn’t drag on the floor and cause more problems, and then went back to dancing! The second incident was a bit later in the night when Patty was standing on the edge of a shallow pit, which was a recess around the edge of the chapel pulpit. While standing there, a large tile she was standing on broke loose, and Patty and the 4kg tile fell into the pit, with the tile landing on top of her big toe. Patty ended up on the floor in a lot of pain and initially we thought the toe was broken. Thankfully, after some icing and a bit of strapping, the prognosis was only some bad bruising, and so back onto the dance floor she went!

The day after the wedding, the majority of the Colombian guests flew home. This left only the international guests, and many of them came with us to a nearby island for a couple of nights to chill out, before also heading home. We also flew out at this time, heading to the coffee lands in central Colombia, to continue our world adventure, also with a number of our wedding guests in tow, who had chosen to experience a bit more of what Colombia had to offer with us. More on this in a later update.

Anecdote: There were more than 20 international wedding guests coming to our wedding, with the majority not being able to speak a word of Spanish. Bearing this in mind, Patty and I spent a lot of time putting together information sheets and a marked up map of the city with key points for each of these guests. One such piece of information was the meeting point for the boat transport out to an island just off the coast, where we had planned to spend a couple of nights after the wedding. We had taken this trip back in May and marked up the maps based on our knowledge from this trip. Unbeknown to us, the pick up point had been changed since then, and on the day we were heading to the island, we ended up with guests in two different locations. However, once realising our mistake, we sorted out things pretty quickly and got everyone to the correct spot to get out to the island. What completely slipped our minds was that there was one other wedding guest, Ellie, who had planned on coming to the island with us, however was not feeling very well and had postponed her trip to the island till the following morning. The first indication we had of a problem was the following morning receiving a text from her, “ÖMG, I think I am on the wrong boat!”. We had forgotten to tell her about the change in pick up point, and as she couldn’t speak any Spanish, and managed to catch some random boat! Realising our oversight, Patty immediately calls her to find out where she is and after a number of minutes of her describing what she can see and relaying this to one of the hotel employees, we are able to work out where she has ended up. Luckily it is on the same island as us, however the island is over 30km long and 10km wide, the majority of it covered in mangroves and jungle, and she is on the opposite side of it to us. With the help of the hotel staff, more phone calls are made, and Patty manages to get in contact with a tour operator who is taking some tourists on a private tour around the island. Patty negotiates with him to pick us up on his way past our hotel, and we head off to try and find Ellie. Forty five minutes later, we finally find Ellie stranded on the end of a pier, being harassed by vendors trying to sell her jewellery, food and tours. I think we were all as relieved as each other to find her safe and sound. The funniest part of the story is that as we had come with a tour group, we then ended up taking a two hour tour of the large Spanish fort that was on the island, before heading back around to the hotel!

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Comments

[deleted_49612]

What a beautiful photo! It just looks so romantic. :)