a traditional romanian wedding

hey all you beautyful people
I'm gonna write this one in english for my foreign friends with whom i wanna share some of the 24/7 moments of traditional romanian stuff i experienced this weekend

so..
place: zarnesti/ a small town near Brasov, surrounded by amazing snowy mountains... dude, whenever I go there I feel like Heidi.. :)) yordalayyy yuhuuu
region: for all the foreigners who don;t have a clue where Brasov is.. let me give u another hint: Zarnesti is close to Bran (where you can find Dracula's crib)
date: 21.05.2006

Ok...now details about this groovie wedding:
The best thing was that I found out how a real (or at least i think it was preety real:) ) romanian wedding feels like.
So:
1.Everything begins with going to the bridegroom's home and "preparing"...
Romanians like to decorate their cars when going to a wedding , so usually they stick on their cars flowers, ballons, bows and the car where the bride rides is decorated with either special flowers, or in some places you can see a doll dressed in white on the car - so this is the hint that you can see the bride there.
Romanians also say that if you see a bride on the street it means that your day will be lucky.

So at the groom's house we drank some palinca ( all foreigners know by now our famous palinca):) and even danced in a big circle, national romanian dances (actually i only watched this one cause I wasn't sure that I could do it).

After this...
2. We went to the goodfather's and goodmother's house and picked them up...
Also there we danced, drank something, and ate some specially made cakes

3. This guys had 2 goodfathers and 2 goodmothers..so as you can easily guess, ...:)) we drank some palica also when going to pick up the second pair of goodfathers:))

4. tanana nana naaam... the big moment arrived so the last stop: the bride's place...
This was the special moment...cause she was really excited and we were like 20 people waiting for her:))
We also danced.. and guess what ? >>>:) drank
and after this we all headed for the curch

It was quite an impressive speech that the priest held... but probably that after all the excitement we were anxiouss to get this over with so that we can get to the partyyyy :) (shame on us)

The party was really crowded... happy people dancing most of the time... and they were around 300 people there old and young... but everybody going crazy for dancing.
I learned to dance sarba and other stuff... hehehe

The key moments of the night(until 00.30 when we had to leave):) were:

- "stealing the bride" a special romanian tradition in which a couple of single dudes "steal" the bride from the weding and they take her to another location meanwhile necogianting with the groom on how much should he pay for her return:))
So Dan , Paul(his brother) and other 2 guys did this and they asked in return some alcohool :) just for the fun of it.
When getting back to the wedding they were punished to hold the bride in their arms and carry her in the ballroom.

- some old tradition with selling some chicken to the goodfather... it was mostly that some dudette dressed in national clothing was negociating over a chicken with everybody..she was funny and all... but i didn;t understand it all completely :)))

- they had a group of romanian traditional dancers that were simply amazing...


:)
well.. i didn;t want to write to much not to get you all boored... but in case you made it this far with the reading it means that it was catchy for you also.

In the end:
My advice:
A romanian traditional wedding = lots of fun+ palinca+ traditions+ more palinca+ dancing + more palincaa...:)))

fun ha?
:)