This year Easter should be a little different. Okay, here it’s not as celebrated as in Germany anyway and you don’t have four days off. And we girls (actually Celina) had our first official photo job! Yeah (means: so with assignment and payment and so… not just for fun) So, off to the neighboring state of Louisiana, to the deepest bayou, to a “Black Wedding” – in the truest sense of the word…
Friday, we drove with Christel, the owner of Celina’s internship photo company, about 7 hours to Coushatta, to the “Grand Bayou Resort” (sounds exciting). Okay, we expected the deepest Mississippi swamp landscape, jungle, and alligators – but the area turned out to be more like Mecklenburg. “Normal” deciduous trees, a lovely lake, “real forest”…. only the mosquitoes and bugs were accordingly in American size.
Well… American weddings are celebrated with a lot of tam-tams. So let’s see what awaits us…
When we were introduced to the “society” on Friday evening, it was a bit strange at first that we two were the only “cheesecakes.” But the initial skepticism subsided quite quickly on Saturday.
We spent Saturday morning relaxing by the lake while the bride and her bridesmaids were coiffed, made up, and dressed in the lodge next door. When we arrived at the Groomsmen (groom and his merry band of men) promptly at 2:00 pm to take photos, the first thing Erik (groom) did was calmly fire up the grill…. Okay… why not. Different cultures, different Customs. In the end, we got a lot of fun snapshots of the happily posing “gangsta rappers” after their transformation into fancy suits!
Afterward, we took location pictures of the event room, the decoration, and everything…
The guests arrived and after some delay also the bride and groom, together with their escorts.
The actual wedding ceremony then took place quite classically with a priest, then fixed three crosses under the marriage contract, dancing, eating…. so not much different than in Germany. (That the wedding planners had forgotten to serve the two a drink reminded me somehow of our wedding, where we stared thirstily at the flower vase). Then, in front of the location, we diligently took photos, the buffet was opened, and there was dancing and cheerful partying.
It only got weird when Erik had to crawl under his Krystal’s skirt – but yes, the garters are thrown to the groomsmen and, on the bride’s part, the flowers to her girls.
All the fun went on until late in the evening. The groom walked around the hall the whole evening, grinning broadly with a colossal whiskey bottle while the bride happily danced and “booty-shaking” with her girls. Well… they already have a somewhat “different” temperament, which could also be seen quite vividly on the dance floor.
Quite dead, we plumped in our little beds at some point while Chrystel with her nephews and siblings were still fishing and partying on the terrace until early Sunday.
It was a great experience, and we took over 1000 photos together. Now it’s time to choose the best 100, edit them, print them, send them, etc. Thank goodness we have four weeks to do this (until the honeymoon is over).
And what did Matthias do during that time?
He used the “free” time and completed his course on “Digital Marketing,” which he started a long time ago, and prepared the documents for our quarterly tax return (which we still did at the tax office on Sunday). So, no time for boredom.