Crazy People - Cutting it tight...

This refers to wedding prep-- if you have had enough of my biggest project ever, our wedding.

I know most of you will not agree with me, but when it comes to air travel, you cannot really get better than British Airways – ease of routes, frequency of flights, good airline music (note to self) and most importantly the flat bed.. Since 2005, I have flown over 60 long haul flights with this airline, to the point that some of the airline attendants recognize me on flights.. especially the London Kuwait Dubai London routes and more recently the London LAX routes. Now British Airways is truly British, you still get the cold yet polite service, weird Shepherd’s pie meal or often the “yes madam, right away madam” response, but it is the flat bed and the loyalty program that attracts me to them.

I relied on the miles I have accumulated time and time again. Holidays to India, Turkey and London (from the US) for John and I – thanks to the loyalty program and it was no different when I needed to make that short trip to South Africa for wedding preparations once in September and then again in October of 2008.

In September 2008, I needed to be in South Africa most importantly for Phares’ wedding. Phares is like a brother to me and often reminds me of the eldest brother that I had.. and there was no way I was going to miss his wedding. So I planned to spend 2 days in Cape Town prior to his wedding in Johannesburg which took place on a Saturday.

If I had planned a wedding from afar about 5 years ago, I don’t think it would have been possible without on the ground continuous help from a wedding organizer. I had some great and focused friends helping me out, and together with their help and that of the internet, I managed to finalize most of the service providers for the wedding.

Hairdressers, make-up, flowers, dresses, décor, priests, entertainment – it is amazing how many South African service providers are flaunting their services on the internet.. From what I could gather weddings is as big business in South Africa as it is in the US and more and more foreigners are getting married in the beautiful venues of South Africa, in order to make their weddings a very affordable yet unique event.. So I was not unique when I interviewed the many service providers for our wedding and many more were very willing to offer their services when they saw that I had a US phone number. The most important things to accomplish on this trip was the dress, the food tasting (John will pair wines a week before the wedding), the priests and the décor. VNL (Vrede en Lust, the venue) sent us menu lists months before the wedding as we needed to make sure that they could accommodate certain requests that we had. Firstly, its not the place of choice for multi-cultural people like John and I. We knew that this would be a challenge irrespective of region.. I am sure many a wine farm in the US would have been sceptical about us. Its not common for a South African of Indian descent to be marrying a half Latvian, half North Korean, American Boy. The wedding organizer at Vrede en Lust was skeptical of our cross culturalism and was even more surprised when she learnt that I was South African born and had only formally left the country 5 years ago – so trying to convince me to purchase Norwegian bottled water for our guests was not going to work, yet she tried anyway.

The Chef, JP (Jean Pierre) on the other hand was great. He had worked in Seoul for 2 years and was intrigued by John’s background and enjoyed the fact that this American Boy loved Karoo Lamb and biltong. He even spoke Korean, which is more than we can say for John :)

When it came to food, I wanted to ensure that we took into consideration most importantly, John’s favorites – caprese salad, carpaccio and a South African favorite karoo lamb. To ensure that the farm could accommodate the Karoo Lamb option, they needed to make sure their organic farmers could rear enough lamb by early November to have it on the table by our wedding.. so as you can see a lot of planning went into this. However there were limitations.. the chefs could not handle serving 3 options for either a main/entrée or a starter/appetizer and we had to remove a few things of the menu. We also had to convince them to flexible on the dessert menu – we wanted the Indian heritage to flow through in the food, and it took numerous tries before we could get the Indian vegetarian option right. We knew that getting them to do Indian desserts was going to be difficult so JP agreed we will get this from outside the farm.

The experience of menu sampling and food tasting was well worth it.. I wish I could do this as a job.. And after watching too many episodes of Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares (Ironic that in the US we subscribe to the BBC channels!), I think I will get good at this job.

It was at this point I decided that holding the Thanksgiving Dinner at the wedding venue would be too difficult, as all we got was the venue.. We needed to arrange for everything else to be brought from outside other than food and drink. Chairs, Tables, lighting, heaters etc had to secured from 3rd party providers. Having thanksgiving dinner would be like organizing a mini wedding, so I looked for a restaurant that this could be outsourced to.

I then met with the potential wedding cake maker – Charly’s Bakery, whom I phoned from the US – bad idea… I should also got the signal that this was not going to work out when she told me that she had a special feeling about me and because of that was willing to fit me into her schedule… at a price of course.. Charly’s Bakery is well regarded, consider them the Dior of wedding cakes in South Africa – very expensive and you often have to ask yourself what did you actually buy – superglam but not functional… More expensive when you are calling from a US mobile, and when our numbers (guest attending) started to drop (which was in mid-October), we asked for a smaller cake (from a 120 serving to 80 serving) and Charly’s said no – its not the done thing.. Now if you attended at our wedding you would have noticed that the wedding cake was nothing but small so much so, that we had an entire tier which travelled back with us to Johannesburg.