Yeah Mun: Riu Ocho Rios

So, the big question:  was the honeymoon worth the awful trip there and back?  Short answer:  yes.

Long answer is a bit more complicated.

OK, so we know from my last post that when we finally--finally--arrived at our resort, I was beyond exhausted, I was more tired than I have ever been in my life.  Naturally, I wasn't in the greatest mood.

So when we trekked up to our room to find it dark and rather gloomy, I was not inclined to forgive.  The blankets were super thin which I guess makes some sense in Jamaica, but they were not very comfortable.  The beds themselves were worse.  They were super hard and not at all inviting even in my nearly comatose state.  The colors in the room can only properly be described as "blech," and even with the windows completely open, the room was dark.

I was not happy.  We seriously considered switching to a much more pleasant-looking suite even though it was an extra $150 per night. We probably would have gone for it if the suite beds had been softer.

Granted, I was not in an easy-to-please mood when we first laid eyes on the room, and Daniel didn't mind it nearly as much as I did, but the decor seriously put a damper on the trip for me.

 The only thing I liked about our room's interior was the differently shaped towels they would leave us each day.

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Fortunately, the rest of the resort was far more pleasing.

Riu Ocho Rios

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We stayed at the Riu Ocho Rios, a large resort in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, and it was basically what it promised to be.

The view was the best thing about our room.

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We had a view of their wedding gazebo.  We actually saw a wedding there.

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 Couldn't resist a new wrap.
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Being a lover of all things water-related, the ocean access and pools were a big selling point for me, and I was not disappointed.  Though not huge and annoyingly roped off to a shallow area because of the reef, the beach was long, warm, and inviting with lots of trees, chairs, and tropical drinks.  There were only a few people there trying to sell things to you, and it became clear to us quickly that they were not supposed to be there, making them easier to avoid.  The water itself was a fantastic temperature though cloudier than I expected.  All in all, certainly satisfactory.

The pools were better.  Normally, I ditch the pools for the beach when it's right there and the same temperature, but these pools did not want to be ignored.  They were large with fountains, waterfalls, lounge chairs (in the pool!), and the crown jewels:  at least one swim-up bar in each pool.  Heavenly.  I cannot express how pleasant it is to swim up to the bar, grab a Jamaican Smile, and then sidle over to a bubble-filled booth to sip it.  I'd say we spent at least 70% of our time at the resort in the pool.

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 Pool Bar

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Riu is an all-inclusive resort, so we did not have to pay for food or drinks at all while we were there.  I cannot express how gloriously freeing it is not to have to worry about the prices of these essentials (yes, alcohol is essential on your honeymoon).  We ate and drank whatever we wanted and did not have to worry about it.  I left mounds of food on my plate everyday uneaten, and I do feel a little bad about that, but it was my honeymoon, damn it, and I'm not going to apologize for it.  The free drinks were the best part.  Not only did we not have to finish them, but we could try all sorts of things and not have to feel cheated if they tasted bad or if we decided halfway through that we didn't feel like a drink after all.

This is how we discovered rum cream.  Rum cream is an amazing and wonderful substance that I have only seen in Jamaica, and I expect never to find its equal.  It's like Bailey's if Bailey's was made with rum instead of whiskey.  For low alcohol, high sugar drinks fan like me, it was perfect.  My drink of choice during the trip was the Jamaican Smile which is essentially a slushy with rum cream.  It.  Was.  Awesome.  (Btw, thanks Laura for recommending it!)

From reviews, we knew not to expect much from the food, and it was pretty much what we expected.  I definitely had a tough time finding things to eat the first few days because my stomach was all wacked out from the time change, stress, and lack of food I had had in the weeks leading up to the wedding.  I really wanted easy to digest foods at that point like pasta, but there wasn't much like that.  I definitely would not recommend Riu Ocho Rios to vegetarians because you will starve.  The meat was definitely the most edible food.  Anyway, as my stomach returned to normal, I found things I liked.  The jerk chicken was by far the best dish available.  And there were so many things to try that even with the food being less-than-stellar, I gained five pounds by the time we went home.

Now, that was for the buffet-style restaurants.  Each guest was allowed to visit each of the "real" restaurants once during the week, and their quality was vastly superior to the ones open to everyone.  Those restaurants looked classier, had dress codes, used actual servers, and had genuinely good meals.  The steak was good enough that I ate my entire massive portion unassisted even after gorging on rum cream and sweets all day.  I wish we had been able to go to these restaurants for a couple more meals because they made us feel like we were really on our honeymoon.

Overall, we had a pleasant experience there.  You could tell the resort was on the cheaper side, and I don't think I'd go back, but for the amount we had to spend at the time, it served well enough.  It was certainly worth the less than $200 a night that we paid.

From the entrance hall.

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Yeah Mun: Sojourn to Jamaica

It occurs to me that I never actually posted about our honeymoon.  Clearly, the time has come.

Our flight to Jamaica was a red eye in every sense of the word.  As you may remember, we did not have a ton of money to spend on the honeymoon as we were mostly relying on our honeymoon registry to make it happen, so we had to take the cheapest flight available.

Sunday morning (the day after the wedding), we were still in Marin.  Though our flight left from San Francisco, we had to drive back to San Jose to drop off a bunch of wedding stuff which meant we needed to budget about 2.5 hours for driving that day.  Lame.  I think by the time we got home and did the repacking we needed to do, we had about an hour before we had to leave to relax.

Obviously, I was already exhausted at this point, not having had a good night's sleep for several months but having been particularly busy and not asleep for the past few weeks.  On top of that, our plane left around midnight.  I cannot sleep on planes.  Or any other moving vehicle for that matter.  I'm just really bad at it.

By the time we got to the airport, and that is a story in itself (decided last minute to spurn public transit, tried to park at BART [subway] and couldn't, and ended up having to park in long-term airport parking.  Woops), we were so tired that I thought even I might have a chance of sleeping on the plane, and I think I may have got in half-an-hour or so.  The thing was, we had a stop, so we didn't really have much time to sleep anyway.

We got to Texas (goodbye promise to never use the George W. Bush airport) around 6 in the morning, and something amazing happened.

Now, I don't just have trouble sleeping on moving vehicles.  I have trouble sleeping in dark, silent rooms at night.  That is to say, I have trouble sleeping all the time, so trying to sleep in a bright, busy airport for me is like trying to become CEO of Disneyland.  Ain't never going to happen.

Clearly, I had never been as tired in my life as I was on that airport floor because I actually fell asleep for a bit.

The honeymoon, for me, was about recovery as much as it was about celebrating our marriage.  I needed a vacation more than I can possibly express.  My airport nap proved that.

I don't think I slept on the plane to Jamaica.  One can only ask so much after all.  It was funny though, as we were waiting to get on the plane, a number of other disheveled newlyweds crept into line around us.  Really makes you realize just how "special" a honeymoon in the Caribbean is.

Anyway, after we had got to the airport and gone through customs and stuff, a shuttle met us to take us to the resort.

Now, I had no idea how big Jamaica was or how long it would take.  Previous experience with this sort of thing lead me to expect about half-an-hour at most.

I think it took an hour-and-a-half to get there.  At that point, I was even more exhausted than I had been in Texas.  How do I know?  I fell asleep on the bus.  Without even trying.  In full sunlight with people around me and massive bumps in the road.  That was truly unprecedented in my life and solid proof that weddings fucking drain the life out of you.  I hope never to be that tired again, but I am kind of proud of myself for falling asleep like that.  It may never happen again.

When we finally got to the hotel, we had to stand in a massive line before getting our room.  It was hot and sticky, and I wanted nothing more than to be able to lay down.  I was too sick and hungry to even accept the cocktails they offered us in line.

Finally, finally, we got to our room, and I basically collapsed onto the bed, not planning to get up again for about a year.

Getting to Jamaica was the worst travel experience I have ever had.  I mean, most of that was because of the exhaustion, but doing the whole red eye and transfer planes thing while taking so long to get to the hotel once we actually got there was pretty awful.  We were traveling for almost 24 hours, and it really doesn't need to take that long to get to Jamaica (it's maybe a 6 hour flight from California).

So the moral of this story is if you can take a non-sucky flight to your honeymoon, do it.  If you can't, make sure you have a week at least wherever you're going because it's just not going to be worth it otherwise.  And trust me, you are not going to do anything in your first 24 hours there, so don't plan on jumping right into activities.

What was your trip to your honeymoon like?  Did you take traveling into account when you planned it?

Six(ty) More Years!

Today, Daniel and I have been together for six whole years.

I know most people stop celebrating their dating anniversary once they get married, but we couldn't quite give the old one up.  When you've had one anniversary for five years, you become rather attached to it, thinking of it as, you know, your anniversary.  The real one.  We may not celebrate it forever, but I think it will always mean something to me, just because we were together for so long before getting married.  It signifies that extra five years on our accomplishment list.

Even without the "length of time we've been together vs. been married" thing though, I think our dating anniversary would still be special for me.  I know a lot of people don't get this, but to me, when we got together is more important than when we got married.

I knew basically from the start that I wanted to be with Daniel for the rest of my life.  It took me some time to be positive, and there were definitely periods when I wavered, but for the most part, I've always thought that we would get married--and stay that way.  The wedding itself was more about logistics and being absolutely sure of our commitment and having dealt with other things first, but it was always going to be just a matter of time.

Of course, we're celebrating our wedding anniversary, you know, bigger.  We're going on a trip and everything then while tonight we're only going to dinner.  But to me, this is the night to really celebrate our time together, to remember how we met and all we've done since then.  After all, we have innumerable wonderful memories from our first five years together.

So Daniel, I'm glad that you're my husband, but tonight I celebrate you being my life companion.  Here's to six wonderful years together.

 06/07:  Our First Summer Together

 07/08:  Tea in London

 08/09:  Disneyland!

 09/10:  Sledding in Chicagoland

 10/11:  Road Trip Back to California though the Grand Canyon

 11/12:  Our Wedding

I love you.

Is your dating anniversary important to you?  Or is it all about the wedding?  What makes you reflect on your relationship?

Winding Down: Sunday Brunch

Initially, I was very much against having a brunch the day after the wedding.  It was one more thing to plan, and I thought I would be too exhausted to want to take part in it and that I would want some alone time with Daniel after the whole wedding business.  Plus, I had been to these things before with Daniel's family, and at the time, it really seemed like it was just an excuse for his family to get together.  Obviously, if we were going to do something like that, I would want it to be equally my people and his.

But in the end, he talked me into it.  I again resisted giving up control to Daniel's aunts because I feared it would become too much of a "their family" thing.  I may have ended up being rather rude about it as well (I hope not, but I certainly wouldn't be surprised if they were offended by my attitude as the day drew near.  Sorry guys).  In the end, it became necessary for me to get stuff off my plate, so I agreed to have them plan it too (mostly).

I am so glad Daniel and co. pushed me into it.

It never occurred to me before the wedding just how much it would mean to have (nearly) everyone close to me in the same place at the same time.  But that weekend I finally figured out not only that I was not going to see many of these people again for quite some time but that having them together, getting to see all of them and having them meet each other, was a wonderful once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.  The wedding itself went by so quickly, had so much going on, and had so many people involved that it was really nice to have other time to actually talk to our guests, especially people we had neglected at the wedding.

Plus, I like small groups of people.  It's just easier for me to talk that way.  So having events with 20 - 30 people instead of 80 made things much less overwhelming for me.

At the same time, I'm glad I stayed involved in planning the day before and after events, even if I may have been the slightest bit irascible in our dealings (yeah...again, sorry about that).  They had a whole different image in mind, but I fought to make sure all of the wedding guests were invited (since basically everyone was from out of town anyway) and to have it at one of the hotels where people were staying so that we could maximize the number of people who could attend.  I don't think fighting the exhaustion would have been worth it to me if we hadn't done these things.

These were the highlights of the brunch for me:

*I really don't know who took these pictures, but I don't think they'll mind me reposting them.*

 My bathing suit was not particularly visible.  Daniel's, not so much.

1.  I got to wear a sun dress and a bathing suit.  There really is nothing like going casual after you've been wearing a massive, tight, poofy dress for a day.

2.  I got to talk to people I love but that I largely ignored during the wedding because I talk to them on a regular basis.

3.  I got some quality time in with our friends Dana and Derek.  Dana had been a lifesaver to me after we moved to San Jose, one of two close friends I still had in the Bay Area.  This was the last time we saw them before they moved to Wisconsin.

4.  Daniel finally got a picture with all of his cousins.  Apparently, children of cousins count.  Carrying on this tradition is really important to him, so I'm glad he got his picture.  I'm also glad we got the following picture of his baby--second cousin? cousin once removed? no idea--Garrett.

Note the hand.  And the mouth.  Priceless.

All in all, a great way to end the wedding weekend and well worth the extra (minimal) trouble.  Especially because I got to go swimming in the massive hotel pool after most of the guests had gone.

Did you do a morning after brunch?  Were you glad you did/did not?

Can You Feel the Love Tonight: Cake, Bouquet, and Goodbye

We had a couple of breaks in the dancing to keep things interesting.  The first was for cake.

Our cake was fantastic on its own, but our cake cutting was pretty fucking badass.

Yes, we cut our cake with a sword.  And not just any sword:  we used Sting, Bilbo/Frodo's sword from The Lord of the Rings.   Yes, we are that cool.  What can I say, my husband's a big LotR fan.  Besides, how many other couples can say that their cake cutter glows in the presence of orcs?

(Side note:  that sword was given to Daniel by his ex-girlfriend.  Totally not awkward at all.)

We proceeded to cut our cake in a cake-cutting fashion, but we hit a little snag.  Literally.  When we tried to cut the cake, the tip of the sword got caught on the cardboard under the top layer, ensuing in the most difficult time a sword has ever had in cutting a cake and hilarity for our guests.

Photos by Stephen Cheng as usual.

 "Finally!  We got it!  Oooo, cake, yum!"

We did eventually figure out the cardboard difficulty and managed to get the sword through the cake.

We had agreed not smash it in each other's faces, but it was a difficult thing to be sure.  To make up for it, we smashed a piece of the top layer onto each other when we got back from our honeymoon.  It was quite satisfying, I must say, although losing bits to the floor was difficult to deal with.  Yes, it was that good (and yes, I am that obsessed with cake).

Mmmm, cake!

Our second dancing interruption was for the bouquet toss.  I know a lot of people don't do them these days, and I kind of understand why, but I also kind of don't.  Neither of us wanted to do a garter toss.  Why that offends me while the bouquet toss doesn't, I do not know (though it may have something to do with Daniel hunting up my dress in front of 80 people.  Just saying).  Nonetheless, I definitely am pro-bouqet toss myself.  Of course, I'm also the first of my friends to get married, so...you know.

In any case, we did it.

Soooo, see how the bouquet is hitting the rafters in that last picture?  Yeah, the ceiling was a little closer than I thought.  I had been so trying to avoid this too!  Oh well.  Daniel's cousin "caught" it, and their family immediately started making fun of her boyfriend who wasn't even there.

Me with Our Bouquet Catcher and Her Sisters

Then there was more dancing, and before we knew it, the last song was playing.

Everyone says your wedding day goes by super fast, so I was prepared for it, but I was still a little sad at how quickly it did go.  Of course, it wouldn't have been quite as quick if our car keys hadn't been stolen, but it was still amazingly fast.  My one real regret for the day is that I didn't have time to talk to people much.  Daniel did, and I'm glad he managed it.  I was too busy dancing.  It really would have been nice to have that extra cocktail hour we had planned on for that.  We got to talk to people at the dinner the night before and at brunch the day after, but not everyone came to those, and I do wish I had been able to visit more with those who didn't.

But I did make up for that a little at the end of the night.

We had to do our own clean up.  The Guayma's people were good enough to help us take down the lights we had strung across the ceiling, but making sure we had everything else was up to us.  We hadn't really gotten around to making a plan for that, so at the end of the night, I was scrambling around trying to help pack everything up and was totally thwarted by every single person there coming to say goodbye to us.

But I didn't mind.  It was nice to get to talk to everybody (who was left), however briefly.  I was utterly exhausted but also elated.  It had been a very, very good day, and I am still gratified by how happy Daniel and I were with the whole affair.  Not everything went perfectly, but it was still a fantastic wedding as the guests proceeded to assure us for the next several months.

When we finally left Guayma's, we were met by this:

It was beautiful and so serene.

A few people tried to get a picture of Daniel and me in front of the water, but there wasn't enough light.  Too bad.  But it was a moment of such beauty that it could not be captured on film anyway.

Finally, the wedding was done, and it was time to retire to our jacuzzi tub for some well-earned relaxation.

Can You Feel the Love Tonight: Gotta Dance!

Honestly, our first dance was not all I had hoped for.  I had this whole grand plan in which we would have a choreographed dance to "Bohemian Rhapsody" with props and everything.  I had half of it choreographed when Daniel backed out.  Though I've been dancing since the age of three, he is much less comfortable, and doing the whole big number was too much.

Can't argue with that.  I was disappointed, but I certainly wasn't going to blame him for being nervous.

But I had pictured at least doing some simple dance moves.  We've done that before.  At Andrew and Nicole's wedding, we helped open the first dance with a waltz, so we do know a little bit about couple dancing.

Nevertheless, when the time came, Daniel said he wanted this dance to be just for us.  Well, honestly, it ended up being more for him than for us.  We mostly did the sway thing, ironically because we danced much more effectively later.  I knew he'd be upset if I didn't let him lead, so I went with it, but I was disappointed that it wasn't a more lively dance, especially considering what I had originally envisioned.

We should have talked about it.  We probably should have practiced too.  I thought about doing so briefly, but it did not occur to me that our dance would be quite so blah.  But oh well, can't do anything about it now.

We still had a good time with it.  After incorporating Lion King and Indiana Jones songs into our wedding, I'm sure having "At Last" as our first dance song seems a queerly conventional choice.  However, it's the closest thing we have to "our song," so there really was nothing to be done about it.

Photos by Stephen Cheng except for the first which was taken by our friend Jorge.

The rest of the night's dancing was much more agreeable for me.  I literally danced to every song.  There were a few times that I tried to go sit down (like to eat our glorious cake and desserts), but since we had done the song list ourselves (and had to cut out all of the remaining fluff and then some due to time constraints), I loved all the songs and just could not let them go by undanced.

Rocking out with My Mom

Daniel and I danced together enough to be satisfactory to both of us, but I spent most of the time dancing with my friends.  Before, I was afraid Daniel would abandon me, and I wouldn't get to dance enough, but I hadn't thought about the fact that pretty much everyone I knew was going to be there.  And the Bride ain't exactly hard to spot.  It didn't matter that Daniel and I danced together probably less than half the time because I had my friends.

And oh the things I made them do!  I had forced a number of group dances into the playlist, including the "Macarena," "YMCA," and the "Cha Cha Slide."  I still don't really understand why Daniel dislikes the "Cha Cha Slide," but I'm glad we put them all in because those were the songs that got EVERYONE onto the dance floor (and by everyone, I mean the cool people...a group my husband cannot claim to be part of).

The "Macarena" was hilarious.  I got out in front of everyone, facing them, and lead the whole thing.  It was weird, but it was kind of cool too, even if the song did go on for way too long.

There was one dance in which literally everyone participated:  the Hora.  For those of you who do not exclusively date Jews, the Hora is a traditional Jewish dance performed at big events like weddings and bar/bat mitzvahs.  Basically, all you need to know about it is that I got lifted up in a chair.  Daniel wanted his aunts to teach everyone how to do the dance before we started, but they didn't quite get the message (they probably should have talked about that ahead of time too) and just started doing it, so we all just sort of caught on.  Oh, and did I mention I got lifted up in a chair?

We did it a little differently, but his will give you the basic idea:

 "OK, don't drop me now!"

 "No, seriously, no dropping the Nicole!"

 "OK, I think I'm safe.  Hey, this is fun!"

 Take a gander at Daniel's uncle's face.  Apparently, he needs to go to more Jewish weddings, get in a bit of exercise.

 My mom was hilarious the whole time she was up in that chair.  She's such a ham!  We got AMAZING pictures of her and Daniel's dad.

The Hora was a ton of fun, and I'm really glad we got to include it in our wedding.

On the other end of the spectrum was the father/daughter dance.  While it was just the two of us, it was deeply meaningful to me, especially because my dad does not dance.  I've known what song I wanted to use for YEARS, and it's definitely a heart-wrencher.  I thought for sure one of us would cry, but we didn't.  Still, you can tell from the pictures that it meant a lot to both of us.

 I didn't want to put my dad through five whole minutes of dancing just the two of us, so we had my mom and Daniel join in about halfway through.  I made sure a number of times that Daniel was OK with this since his mom wasn't there, but he assured me he was, and he and my mom seem to have a grand old time.

My dad and I have never really communicated as well as my mom and I.  We still have a really good relationship, but my mom was always the one who asked all the questions while my dad hesitated to make me repeat everything.  Plus, he was gone a lot when I was growing up, and there's always been a slight (slight) tension between us because of it.  Though he never exactly said anything, I know he felt a little bit like he was losing me as the wedding approached, and I'm glad we had the dance to sort of visually confirm that our love for each other wasn't going anywhere just because I was getting married.

There was one more dance of significance that night, and it was quite an accident that it became noteworthy.  My Maid of Honor and I had not planned on performing a duet.  I should explain.  Seema's family had a lot of massive Indian parties when we were in high school that I attended.  I LOVED them!  Indian parties kick American parties in their oversized booties.  Anyway.  There was one song that they always played from some Bollywood film that I especially enjoyed, and I wanted to include it in the wedding.  Naturally, I expected some people to be hesitant to dance to a song that they not only had never heard but also was sung in a language they could not understand.  However, I did not anticipate that EVERYONE would be too chicken to get out there.

So Seema and I ended up dancing the entire song by ourselves.  And it is not a short song.  Now, I don't really know what I'm doing when it comes to Indian dance.  I know a couple of moves, particularly for this song, that I picked up at parties, but that's all.  However, I have been dancing for 13 years, so I catch on quickly.  Seema on the other hand has done multiple types of Indian dancing professionally.  So as the song was playing, I pretty much copied everything she did.  The result was that almost everyone at the wedding thought we had choreographed the dance and planned on performing it as a duet.

Woops.

This was absolutely the most pleasant surprise of the evening.  After we finished, everyone came and asked how long we had been practicing.  My response?  "Well, we started dancing five minutes ago, so...."

Daniel's aunt happened to get it on video, so you can decide for yourself whether it looks like we planned it or not.

http://www2.snapfish.com/snapfish/slideshow/AlbumID=7044279009/PictureID=368463273009/a=3626415023_75475509/otsc=SHR/otsi=SPIClink/COBRAND_NAME=snapfish/

P.S.  Doing this dance in that dress was NOT EASY!

If you're curious, this is what the official dance looks like:

It was a great moment for my best friend and me.  Plus, getting more multicultural stuff in is always fun.

And that about wraps up dancing for the evening.  I know, I know, you can't wait for more, how could I make this post so short?  Yeah, dancing is awesome.  I had SO MUCH FUN with all of the dancing we did that night.  Truly, my wedding was the best dance party I have ever been to.  I mean really, how could it not be when all of the music was tailored toward us AND everyone we love was dancing with us?

Was dancing important to your wedding?  Did you include any out of the ordinary songs?  Anyone else out there actually like the "Macarena?"