wedding, start of honeymoon

[kragen@pobox.com]

2003-06-07
Today was our wedding day.

When we awoke in Beatrice's childhood bed, Beatrice told me of a dream that echoed our discussions from the planning of the ceremony.  In her dream, I wanted to release insects at the ceremony, rather than doves; many sizes of insects, ranging from small flies to meter-long monsters.  Beatrice didn't like the idea, and it scared many guests away, especially when many of the insects exploded, splattering out toxic, smelly liquids.  People fled.

Together we walked on the beach.  We gazed into one another's eyes, and together we recited our vows one last time before the wedding proper.

I wore an Indian kurta, which drew many compliments; Beatrice wore a traditional English-style wedding dress (toward the simpler end of the spectrum) but had hennaed her hands and feet beforehand.

Everything finally fell into place.  We each got to see many people we love, people who came to Bolinas to support us in our declaration of love for one another.  Many of them we hadn't seen in years, or ever.  We each made minor mistakes in our vows (we'd tried to memorize them, but hadn't repeated them enough.) but we helped each other through it, each whispering hints when the other got stuck.  Beatrice couldn't get my ring onto my dry finger, so she sucked on my finger for a second -- in front of everybody! -- which helped the ring go on 

In order to get Beatrice to the end of the aisle without being seen, the florist's van picked her up behind the house, then drove around front to unload her behind some bushes.

Beatrice's young relative Ora threw flower petals on her path.  Ora's almost 3, so she looked impossibly cute and prompted many oohs and aahs from the crowd.

Ka-Ping Yee made a beautiful piece of calligraphic art of our vows, which we signed along with the official wedding license.

The vows themselves follow:

Day by day, I know and  love you more, but I know your complexities are beyond my ken.  I learn from your wisdom every day.  Your mind stirs my soul to new heights; your faith in me gives me strength; your touch delights me; and without your love I am incomplete.  Between us, we find the echo of that love which has filled the universe since the dawn of creation; through us, it spreads peace and harmony to our friends and family and beyond.
So this day I bind myself to you with these wedding vows, willingly and wholeheartedly, free from any doubt or mental reservation:
In riches and in poverty, in jubilation and in despair, in sickness and in health, despite our flaws, I will share my life with you.
All that is mine is yours.
With love I will tell you the truth, as I understand it;
I will honor and respect you;
I will rejoice in your joys and weep in your sorrows;
I will love and cherish you, without cease and without pause, through all the days of our lives, until death parts us.

It presently graces the wall of Beatrice's family home in Bolinas, but we plan to take it home after the honeymoon.

After the ceremony ended, Art Rogers photographed us all as one large group with his wonted large-format camera with panchromatic film.

We led the buffet line at the reception, so we got a chance to eat, despite all the other demands on our time.  Kim Labao's Indian Peach Catering did a beautiful job on the food; many people complimented us on the amazing yam/coconut milk/chard/curry casserole.

We'd made a lot of blackberry jam over the year before the wedding; today we gave it all away to the wedding guests in little four-ounce jars with ribbons tied around them.

Many people left the reception quite early; the wedding started a little after noon, and people started leaving around 16:30.  So we didn't have time to talk to a lot of people we care about.  More posed photos aggravated this problem, taking up our precious time.

Somebody decorated our getaway car -- Bea's Honda -- with shaving cream letters spelling out, "JUST MARRIED", and tied cans to the back end of the car.  Oh, the embarrassment.  Lucky us, we only had to drive down ten miles of country road to the Druids' Hall Inn in Olema, where the proprietor volunteered to hose down the car for us.

I carried her over the threshold. We made love as husband and wife for the first time.

2003-06-08
Today Beatrice and I woke up for the first time as husband and wife at the Druids' Hall Inn in Olema, California.  At breakfast, we ran into a woman we'd never met, but who knew us.  We'd visited her house a couple of months before, because the woman who made our wedding cake was housesitting for her.  We'd gone to the house to meet this baker and try out her cakes.  (Her name is Claire Ptak, and I can heartily recommend her cakes.) 

We picked up drinks from Beatrice's parents' house and drove down to Stinson Beach for the afternoon party, arriving just at noon, the appointed time.

Eventually, despite the gray sky, the slight rain, and the sharp chill in the air, about 25 people showed up, mostly our immediate families.  We talked, ate, drank, dug in the sand, and played frisbee.  Beatrice's brother gave her a birthday present: 512 mebibytes of RAM for her laptop (a lot, but not unheard of in these times) and MacOS X.II.

Around 17:00,  we went home, taking my family and some of my friends with us back to our apartment, where we ordered in dinner.  My cousin Albert got a chance to confab with some of the Canonical Hackers, and I gave him an old laptop that's broken in some way I can't remember.  It appeared to work perfectly when we tried it.  (His family doesn't have much extra money.)

In keeping with the syncretistic but vaguely Indian tone of the wedding, we got sushi and take-out Indian food for the assembled masses.

We packed a bit for the honeymoon, which starts tomorrow.

2003-06-09
I finished packing for the honeymoon this morning, and both Beatrice and I paid our bills.

My brother Jay drove me and Beatrice to the airport to begin our two-week honeymoon in Costa Rica.  He'll watch our house while we're away.

As we boarded our flight from San Francisco to Houston, we ran into another couple headed for Costa Rica, named Jackie and Olivia.  As it turned out, they lived a few blocks away from us, were staying in the same Costa Rican hotel that night, and one of them had started out going to the same Ivy League college Beatrice started out at. 

Bea spent much of the flight reading a romance novel; I read our guidebook about Costa Rica.

On the ground, we split the $12 cab fare to our hotel with Jackie and Olivia, but their early-morning departure for Arenal wasn't what we had in mind., so we bid them farewell as we checked in.

2003-06-10
Beatrice and I woke up in our room in the Fleur de Lys hotel in San Jose, Costa Rica, and Bea headed down to the market; her headache needed decongestants.  I slept some more, then headed down to breakfast with her.  Marmalade here is a name for flavored syrup.  I had some orange marmalade and some guava marmalade on my toast.

A young Californian man downtown begged me to buy him a meal.  Two girls, he said, had stolen all his money the night before, and he would eat in front of me.  I regretted that I was about to catch a bus out of town and expressed my hopes that he would soon find a meal patron.

Around 12:30, we bought bus tickets to Manuel Antonio, 1835 colones each, or about US$4.50.  Buses from San Jose run to Manuel Antonio three times a day: at 6:00, 12:00, and 18:00.  So we prepared for a long wait.  Bea had a Clif Bar; our stash of 8 won't last much longer.  I went to go talk to taxi drivers about other options, and got a fare quote of 35000 colones ("un super-precio!"), about US$88.  That seemed like a lot of money for two people's transit, so I turned him down amd went back to the bus station to wait for five more hours.

Back at the bus station, Beatrice had chatted up a cute twentysomething bar manager waiting for a bus to Jaco.  Her name was Angelly, and she was willing to share cab fare to Jaco, which is most of the way to Manuel Antonio.  So we accepted the super-precio and began our journey.

Beatrice slept in the cab, making up for the sleep she'd missed in the morning buying decongestants.  I chatted with Angelly about her job, her hobbies (poetry and dancing), her family, her college career, etc.  When we dropped her off at her bar in Jaco, she gave us chilled bottles of water to drink on the rest of the trip.

We came to a choque en un puente and had to wait for a while; somebody had thought the bridge was a two-laner and had smashed up the side of somebody else's SUV.  A motor scooter marked "POLICIA" sat behind the SUV.  Our taxi driver drove very cautiously across the puente.

The beauty of the land staggered me, but it seemed very familiar.  The people, houses, and roads were like those of Pohnpei; the vegetation seemed like Pohnpei plus cactus and yucca.  The notorious potholes were surprisingly mild.  

We stopped at La Mariposa hotel just outside of Manuel Antonio.  The room rates seemed reasonable for a luxury hotel -- $145 for the "Junior Suite", a large room without a kitchen but with an amazing view, albeit with a minimum two-night stay -- but the staff seems sycophantic and they charge exorbitant prices for everything.  (US$2.50 to wash a blouse; $1.25 for a bra.  $5 for half an hour of Internet usage.)

I put on my Birkenstocks and we walked a little way down the hill to the Costa Verde restaurant for dinner.  My three-course a la carte vegetariano meal cost 4800 colones, or $12.

A full-grown cicada crawled on the screens outside our hotel room.  Cicadas in New Mexico grow to about twice the size.

2003-06-11
Today Beatrice and I got up around 9:00 at our hotel in Manuel Antonio.  We strolled down the hill to the beach; I drank a drinking coconut and went for a short swim while Beatrice read _Exit to Eden_.  Now she's sitting by the side of a pool, sipping a pina colada.  Our walk to the restaurant last night left me with a small Birkenstock blister; today the ocean filled it with sand.  I deroofed it, but without a knife (I normally carry one, but didn't dare to bring it aboard the airplane) I tore the skin a bit too far, leaving a bleeding hole in my foot -- not the tropical traveler's dream.  We'll pick up a first aid kit later today, a towel, and perhaps a knife.

I think I had the right idea to pack only what I could fit on my back, but I packed rather too much.  My pack weighs about 50 pounds, which really slows me down on walks, and it takes up too much space in taxis and airplanes and such spaces.

Many strange and beautiful animals and plants live here.  A basilisk greeted us earlier as we walked up to this pool.  By some trees here I found some rigid, water-filled inflorescences that exhibit spiral phyllotaxis  and gradually fade from deep red at the bottom to pale green at the top.  They appear to be monocotyledons to my untrained eye.

Ants run everywhere.  In our hotel room, they served us a fruit smoothee last night; in the morning, ants filled the cup and a large cockroach struggled pathetically to escape the pitcher.

I used to laugh at medieval Europeans for their belief that bathing was unhealthy, but yesterday, as I kissed Beatrice in the shower, I realized that bathing in the fecally-contaminated waters of medieval European rivers probably would harm your health.