Never have I ever...Crashed a Wedding: No More

Excellent Photo Skills, Random Person at the Wedding. Thanks...

Last Tuesday my mom's first cousin's daughter Shiran got married. The wedding was in a wedding hall near Netanya that is not accessable by public transportation, so we decided to rent a car and make a day out of it. More pictures of the "day of it" later.

Now, my mom has a lot of cousins here, and most of them I wouldn't recognize. Shula, the mother of the bride however, is very close with my mom, and even came to America for my wedding. I definitely recognize her. And her three children, we used to spend a lot of time together in summers we spent in Israel. But that was 15 years ago.

So we started the day with myself, Ami, Eitan and Nina (still off from the Army on leave for her mystery rash) and we picked up Yosef (aka Uncle Boface) at the Netanya train station and headed for the wedding.

The wedding was here, beautiful outdoor gardens (with lots of enormous fans to keep everyone from melting) on Kibbutz Gaash. Before we left I had google mapped directions to Kibbutz Gaash, so we'd make sure not to get lost.

The wedding was was called for 7:30, but we were warned by another cousin that these things rarely start on time, and the Chuppah would be closer to 9pm. So we arrived, 3 Rozmaryns, 2 Kirschenbaums at around 8, while one more Kirschenbaum and a Kamin were still on their way from Tel Aviv.

We were enjoying ourselves, eating cocktail hour food, drinking, getting our pictures taken by the photographer ("we're the American cousins of the bride") when we get a call that the Kirschenbaum/Kamin duo had arrived. We told them that we were upstairs at the cocktail room, to which the response was, what are you talking about, there is no upstairs, it's a garden. Right, it IS a garden. How did we not realize we were indoors? I don't know.

Hmmmm...

After taking a minute to regroup, we realize we had to be at the wrong wedding. Yes, we didn't recognize anyone, but I didn't expect to other then the bride (in the white dress- giveaway) and her mom, who I figured was just busy with mother of the bridey stuff.

So we went to the front of the hall, talked to some security guys and learned that there are FOUR even facilities at Kibbutz Gaash, and gave us the two minute driving directions to where we really needed to go. Problem was Yosef already had dropped off the gift for the bride and groom in the safe. In Israel, there are no registries, and people just give cash. So yes, the wrong names of the Bride and Groom were on the front of the envelope that Yosef slipped in the safe, but still. The facilities coordinator was NOT into opening up a safe in the middle of the wedding so Yosef could rifle through envelopes to find his. They told him to come back at the end of the evening, but I've been too scared to find out what ended up happening.


So we finally arrived at the RIGHT wedding, in time for a second cocktail hour, and with plenty of time before the Chuppah, and with a fabulous story under our belts. And still didn't know anyone at the wedding aside from the Bride, Mother of the Bride but also two cousins who also are particularly close with my mom that have visited the US recently.

So that's the story of the first wedding we ever crashed.