As I mentioned in my previous post, wedding celebrations in Ukraine can last a few days. I’m honestly not sure what happens over all those days, but maybe that’s just my culture bias showing through. American weddings — all on one incredibly full and usually stressful day; to me, that just makes sense. I guess that in some ways, that’s what we had here too.

After the ceremony — which, all told (including the sales pitch for photos), was about 45 minutes — we all walked down the street to a restaurant and took over one of the back corners. Not that we were a big “all” — it was me and my wife, her son Zhenya, my wife’s mother Svetlana, her sister Inna and Inna’s toddler Rodion. And Svetlana, our translator, of course. (Well, maybe not “of course;” my wife and I can communicate pretty well, but Svetlana was integral to our courtship and wedding, so why not?)

We ordered a bottle of wine, assorted other drinks, a couple salads, some breads and some pork and veal “shish kebab.” Curiously no pastry item, a la, a wedding cake. But it was pretty nice. I got to learn more about the traditional customs we weren’t following, I told them about a “traditional” American wedding (they actually have a hard time understanding that Americans don’t all do the same things the same way, but Ukraine is not a country of immigrants either), and really just had a nice time.

There was a little business as well. Since Svetlana the translator was there not just as a witness to the wedding, but also in her professional capacity, she helped my wife fill out her piece of the immigration paperwork I’ll need to do when I return. If I’d thought that my wife was stressed out about the wedding, that almost paled in comparison to her concern about filling out a simple biographic form. Granted, we are talking wholly different alphabets here, and that was a bit of the problem (for example, that backwards Russian R could be translated as “a,” “ia,” or “ya”), but still, I think she was waaaay more worried about making a mistake than she needed to be. But she got it all filled out, and then we all had a pretty nice time. I think we were there about 4 hours, which seemed about right for that sort of wedding reception. (I told my wife we’d probably have a couple more ceremonies and/or receptions when she gets to the US.)

So that was the wedding. Even with three posts, I’ve probably left out a bit. And of course there are pictures, but it looks like those will again need to wait until I’m back home. (If I’d planned a little better, I could have bought and brought a little attachment that would let me copy the camera photos to my iPad. And sadly I haven’t been able to find one at the Apple or computer stores here. C’est la vie!)