See Monkey Travel: Wara+Adam: Our First Thai Wedding!

I have long dreamed of attending a Thai wedding and am so thrilled that the first (and probably only one) was a celebration of our friends Adam and Wara. Sam and Adam have been playing ice hockey together and he was one of our first friends in Bangkok. He's a Canadian international school teacher who has previously worked in Korea and now Thailand. Wara is a super smart, charming woman from a Thai family whose business is to build temples. Apparently the company is widely known (they just built a temple in Boston) and this wedding was a key affair for the family's friends and business contacts alike.

The wedding invitation.

The wedding took place on the final Sunday of the New Year holiday and we were invited to the celebration at 6pm even though the Thai ceremonies began about 12 hours before that! Talk about a long day. I'm not sure of the exact sequence of events, but I know it included:

A parade riding on elephants' backs through a village for which they hired extras. Yes, extras as if it were a movie set.
An obstacle course that Adam had to get through in order to find Wara. His favorite? When Wara's friends made him yell, "Waraporn Boonmeerit, I love you!" at the top of his lungs.
A ceremony in which the family blesses the newlyweds' bed and then everyone takes pictures of them laying in it.

Adam and Wara during the Thai ceremonies.

We ventured out to the reception venue by way of BTS (our public light-rail train) as far west as it goes. From there we took a taxi for about an hour through the suburban sprawl of Bangkok. We were speeding along through this much less densely populated area until we happened upon a bit of a traffic jam and policemen directing traffic. Yes. We had arrived at the wedding. Along with 1500 other people, about 15 of them being foreigners.

Our sole photo with the bride and groom.

After trying and failing to evade the MCs (there were two), we gave an interview for the whole audience to view on the live monitors dispersed throughout the venue and immediately took a strategic seat near the bar. Here, we chatted with Adam's other teacher friends and Sport Corner bar owner, Tim, who sponsored the boys' hockey team for the past several seasons.

Our farang fan section.

We chowed down and enjoyed the neverending booze while watching the livefeed of Adam and Wara's whereabouts at the venue. This was interrupted with a montage of the day's events that had led up to this moment. Their AV crew must have been BUSY putting all the footage together and showing it on the same day. After that, we all watched some interview snippets from their engagement photo session where they talk about how they met, etc. The highlight? The music videos that Adam and Wara made to songs like "Just the Two of Us," "Call Me Maybe," and "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?"

They stood here for about an hour while
guests came to take photos with them.

We were definitely the most rowdy guests there. While most people trickled out after the buffet ended, the foreigners hung around dancing like no one was watching (because they weren't) and eventually we took the hint, as staff put every single other piece of furniture away except our table and chairs, that we needed to move to the after party. Here, we had some lovely quality time with Adam and Wara in their Thai style residence at the reception venue. We definitely stayed out too late, but it was a celebration well worth the exhaustion the following day at work. What an experience!