Between the shells, love
Back in 2015, Natalia and I signed a ‘stable union’, the Brazilian version of a civil partnership. In Brazil, this is, for all intents and purposes, the same as a marriage, and it allowed me to not have to leave Brazil for half the year. This followed after my being deported because of a cockup in calculating the number of days I had been in (and out of) Brazil, by the Brazilian Federal Police.
Five years later, Natalia received a grant to study at Harvard. This extended to her husband, me, but, in the US, the Brazilian ‘stable union’ is not recognised as equal to a marriage, so we got married.
Except, this now was 2020, the height of COVID. The streets of São Paulo were empty, the solicitors’ office, where we said our vows, was closed most of the time, meaning we had to set the date in accordance to when they were staffed, and only ourselves, two witnesses, and two officials were allowed to attend.
We had a Twitter wedding (though I just found out those broadcasts are no longer available), and had champagne and cake on the street in front of the office, the occasional delivery cyclist shouting their congratulations at us.
We promised we would have a party ‘later’, but it was only after Joost and Neha (and Ameya) visited last year, with Joost bugging us nearly daily, that we finally committed to a party.
My only desire was that we would celebrate on the beach.
This turned out to be a tad more difficult than expected, but we managed, and ended up with a rather fantastic ceremony on Guaiúba, one of the really lovely, and lesser-known, beaches, very close to São Paulo.
Friends lent us their house in Guarujá for the party, almost next to the beach, and some 60 friends and family came over, including a good bunchy from Holland, with most Dutch visitors spending several weeks in the country.
Between the shells, we expressed our love, commitments and dedications, and had an ‘Indian’ wedding; 5 days of connected events, with excellent food and drinks, a great party, some pilates, and the ‘bachelor’ running around as Fed Flintstone.
Early on, we had the insight that we needed someone else to organise the bulk of the events. We managed to convince Tarsila, an old friend of Natalia’s, to be employed in our service, and she was great in pulling it all together.
And she was necessary in finding alternatives for some things that turned out to be difficult or even impossible.
I had assumed that it should, in principle, be possible to ‘just’ rock up on the beach with 50 friends and eat and drink. Not so, according to Natalia and Tarsila, but the end result, with a caterer and event organiser, worked out very well.
We needed authorisation from the municipality, which also meant we couldn’t secure our first choice of beach, the nearby Praia de Tombo, but perhaps Guaiúba was the better choice after all.
The ceremony was only to run for one hour, at most, and no food and drinks were to be served, though we managed to bend the rules just a bit, and serve champagne.
I had wanted a large, flat, single-storey, cake with a photo of Natalia and myself printed on it, but that technology has not yet arrived in this neck of the woods.
Then I had wanted to give a fridge magnet as the little present for those attending the festivities. Specifically, I wanted a group photo of the ceremony to be rushed to a printer, then producing 60, or so, magnets between the end of the ceremony and the end of the party, handing them out when the guests were set to leave.
But, we found no printer in, or near, Guarujá on hand to facilitate this.
Instead, I ordered printed magnets well in advance. I’m still waiting for them to arrive.
A customary departure gift for wedding party goers is a ‘bem casado’, which translates to ‘well wedded’, and, as Joost’s wife pointed out, somewhat resembles an alfajor; it’s a little sandwich of soft white bread, with a layer of doce de leite in between.
They’re too sweet for my taste, but we had convinced the baker to add rum to the layer of doce de leite, making them into something, apparently, not seen before on these shores (but isn’t this an obvious mix, particularly for a wedding party?). But then, in a follow-up conversation between the baker and Tarsila, the baker decided we were too demanding, and cancelled the agreement on her end.
The alternate provider was not comfortable with putting rum in the sweets, but was convinced to have half of them not stuffed with doce de leite, but with a lemon cream. Also a bit of a coup, I was told.
We also had to abandon our first choice for caterer, an excellent cook with a good restaurant close to our house, but ended up with a great alternative, serving a fantastic moqueca, a kind of fish-stew typical for the Brazilian Northeast.
All, really, only minor speed bumps on the road to an excellent 5 days of our ‘Indian’ wedding. Still, I really would have liked to have those magnets.
Extrapolating the events of the previous decade, it appears we have to throw another major event in 5 years time. Considering the turnouts for the previous two events, and this ceremony, I did some extrapolating, and found this indicated we are going to have around 6000 guests at our next party.
We, of course’s have to first defeat Big Capital, and, somehow, manage to acquire the riches to afford that.