Weddings

I went to a wedding last week. Even though I've been to quite a few weddings in my time here I have actually never been to one where I knew the bride or groom or even someone in their family until this one. The first wedding I went to some local friends just called and asked me to go with them. When I told them I couldn't go because I wasn't invited and didn't know the people getting married they said 'we don't either. Another friend invited us.' I asked around and people told me that going to weddings uninvited was totally normal so I went. It was fine, although after a while I realized that I actually find weddings here extremely annoying and have since decided I will only go if I know the bride. Anyways.
I talked some of my foreigner friends into coming with me, just because I hate being the only white girl there and the center of attention. Another reason why I don't like going to weddings of people I don't know...the white girl is always the center of attention and I just think that the bride should get to have one day where everyone is looking at her. Now if she invites me to come then she brough it on herself.

We got there and were immediately surrounded by people wanting to talk to the foreigners. After about 30 minutes that got old, so we walked around for a while then sat again where we were again immediately surrounded. At this point, one lady said that there was something about my eyes that made me look black. I'm fairly certain I understood what she was saying since I kept saying that my eyes were blue and she kept saying, 'yes, they're blue but they make your skin look black like an african'. I don't understand why I was 'black' and my friends were still white. Here's a picture of the 3 of us. If you somehow see what this lady was talking about please let me know because I sure can't figure it out!
After about 2 hours of sitting there talking with people, which can get annoying after a while when you don't know them and all they want to do is know where you are from, what you think of their country, and how American weddings are different, the bride and groom finally showed up. Then there was really loud music and dancing. Here's me and my volleyball friend dancing.
Our hands aren't just looking funny. Dancing here involves very little movement but a lot of snapping your fingers and moving your hand back and forth and not surprisingly, I'm still not very good at it. Anyways. The music has to be turned off at 11pm (govt rule) and since the bride didn't show up until 10:15, there was about 45 minutes of dancing. The music was so loud that once 11 rolled around no one could hear anything and so everyone was yelling at each other to talk...always fun to watch.

We left about 11:30, but my friend insisted that they were just getting started and they were going to have some sort of ceremony where they bride and groom changed clothes and then sat on a bed next to each other while they were doused in different types of perfumes. While that sounded really interesting, we're kind of supposed to be home around 11pm or somewhere close to that and we figured that 2 am didn't qualify as 'somewhere close'.

So there's my wedding experience from this week. I could go into tons of details on how weddings here are completely different from American weddings, but I explained this in Arabic about 25 times during the hours that we were just sitting there waiting for the bride to come and I just don't know that I want to explain it ever again.