Two Siblings-in-law and a Wedding
Wedding
We attended a beautiful wedding Saturday night. Parties start late here.
The service at the church was scheduled to start at 8:45PM, but ended up not starting until around 9:30PM. No one batted an eye here, it's very typical for weddings to start pretty late. Most guests were respectful and showed up on time. "On time" has a different meaning here. No one was visibly bothered by the late start. The bride and groom arrived at the reception party at 11:51 PM. We left the party a little before 2:00AM to get Zoey to bed since she had been passed out for quite a while.
As a cultural note: In Brazil, they only list when parties start, they never list an end time. The party goes as long as it needs to.
One weird thing: A guy showed up in shorts and a t-shirt. Apparently that's rather common here, and it's generally someone who wasn't invited that wants to sit in and watch the ceremony.
One surprise was the priest belting out all of the tunes. The priest sounded like a professional singer.
When the mass ends, people who aren't a part of the wedding gather at the church entrance to watch the wedding party exit to see the dresses and everything else going on. It's a small town, so it's probably a good time to catch up on the latest gossip as well.
The party venue was very nice and well decorated. I found out the venue is owned by the parents of one of Jenifer's childhood friends who we met in São Paulo earlier in the week. It was very classy and nice. There weren't any things that I'd say were different than you'd see in the US. However, there were a ton of disco balls. From my count, close to three dozen over the dance floor:
Wedding Music
The song selections included a ton of American tunes. After the ceremony, the wedding party personally congratulates the new bride and groom with a hug and a short conversation before exiting. They do this couple-by-couple until they are all gone. During that time, the band in the church played a cover of A Thousand Years.
Now here's the lineup. This is in order:
- Bride & Groom entry: Avicii, Aloe Blacc - Wake Me Up
- First Dance: Classical Music, not sure the title
- Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood (Cover)
- Can't Take My Eyes off You - Frankie Valli and The 4 Seasons
- Aretha Franklin - I say a little prayer
- A folksy song that I didn't recognize, also in English
- Then they played a Brazilian song that was using Amarillo by Morning as the melody in the background. The lyrics had nothing to do with the original song.
Then there were a few Brazilian tunes played.
Then during the relationship videos they do at a lot of weddings showing the two growing up separately, and the finishing with a bunch of photos of them together. Here was the lineup for songs and movie clips:
- Bride's Song - Jason Mraz - I'm Yours
- Groom's Song - Train - Hey, Soul Sister
- Couple's Song - Brazilian song followed by a mash up of the Hawaii 5-0 theme and Twist & Shout
Clips in the videos came from the following movies:
And to top it off, one of the first tunes the live band played after the couple video was Happy by Pharrell Williams. Being able to sing along (poorly) was awesome!
I don't have any pictures of the bride and groom that aren't blurry (they were constantly moving), but Jenifer has a few we'll toss up on other mediums.
My siblings-in-law
At the wedding, I told my brother-in-law that he would be wearing Zoey's bib by the end of the night. He said, "I'll do it right now!" Here's the pic with him and my sister-in-law:
Well played, Jair.
It's been fun interacting with them. They both have pretty decent English, which surprised me. I flat assumed Jenifer would be my full-time translator. Now I have three! I'm setting a goal to get through three Portuguese lessons on Rosetta Stone per day while I'm here, so hopefully less translation will be needed over time.
Sao Paulo Cathedral Update
I forgot to include an arch picture that showed the bricks within the arches, so here's one:
