Puja and Sunjeev's Wedding

Puja's wedding was lots of fun. I had kind of a lame thanksgiving where I went to work and then afterwards played videogames. The next morning I flew out to LAX. My first flight was delayed because one of the flight attendants was running late. Very late. We were supposed to leave at 10AM, but by 11:30 the guy still hadn't showed up and people were pissed. Eventually one of the workers got on a speaker and said "We've receieved confirmation that the flight attendent is in the airport, it shouldn't be long now!" Then like 30 minutes later a guy in the a flight attendent uniform comes strolling down the walkway. Everyone was watching him and a bunch of people were standing but there were no cheers, just lots and lots of angry faces. I was upset too. This asshole thinks he can just sleep in late, he should be billed for my time and every other person on that plane. We were already highly irritated and this man's casual stroll up to the gate was not helping anything. I was about to stand up on my chair and yell "Lynch the bastard!" when saw him display some fairly feminine mannerisms while talking to his coworkers. That stopped me. Far be it from me to incite a possible hate-crime. Later we found out that he wasn't the originally scheduled flight attendent anyway. The original flight attendent got in a car accident or something on the way to the airport and just never showed up so this guy was filling in.

From LAX I picked up a rental car, probably wisely went with the GPS option and then tried to drive to the hotel. But the GPS was fixated on the car rental as a destination, so I did a large loop back to Avis and it told me I had arrived. Finally I did get to the hotel, but everyone was at Puja's night-before dinner which was somewhere else (I didn't know where) so I went to Jack in the Box and watched tv in the hotel room. Fast food isn't as good as it used to be. People got back from the dinner at like 11:30 and I briefly said hello to Puja and talked a bit with Rachel, and then went to sleep.

Puja, without prior warning, called our room at 7AM to come have breakfast with her. It was a pretty good buffet spread, so we ate, then went to Target and bought a bunch of random stuff people needed. Hmmm, oh, then I drove around with Rachel looking for somewhere to get lunch. I thought we were driving toward Disneyland because I had passed it on the way to the hotel the evening before, but apparently I got all confused and totally drove the wrong way. Oh well. Rachel and I were wearing matching "I survived Puja and Sunjeev's wedding" shirts, on the back of which said "Just Married". And we got congradulated by some random people on our new marriage. Rachel quickly corrected them :)

The wedding itself was pretty interesting. Sunjeev road around the hotel on a horse. Rachel and the other bridesmaids (wearing Indian wraps) carried candles around and weren't allowed outside to see the horse because they were women on the bride's side. Then there was a long series of blessings and symbolic actions. The whole thing took a few hours. There was an open bar afterwards and a pretty good dinner and some dancing (which I actually participated in and was having an alright time, up until the bar closed toward the end of the night and I started sobering up).

There was an after-party at Puja and Mehrnaz's room, where we played cards. F*** The Dealer (where I somehow guessed cards amazingly well, and got the majority of the cards on the first try, and pretty much all the rest on the second try, only having to drink like twice), Kings (Puja's old coworkers have no skills in the "Questions" event), and Asshole (it took me two hands to make it to president and then I only stayed there for two hands before getting ousted. But we were playing without the President getting any tribute and I think I would have done well if we had been doing that.) We had a truely atrocious selection of liquor. No beer at all. I drank rum and coke (horrible, foul stuff) until the rum ran out and then I started drinking tequilla and coke, which was exponentially worse.

I didn't get much sleep at all, and the next morning my rental car's GPS decided to take me in a nice circle several times before finding a gas station. Then getting back to the rental place was impossible, I circled around for like 30 minutes because the stupid thing said "Avis Rental on the left" but there was nothing on the left. Finally I used the rental place's address and just hunted it down the old-fashiond way. I missed my flight but got a standby flight about an hour later. Then I was unable to board 2 standby flights in Chicago, and they wanted me to wait until 6am the next morning! So instead I got a flight to Dulles and got in at about 4am. My baggage went to Reagan but was easily picked up later.

Photos coming soon.

(Much to Dave's disappointment, at Tom's wedding all girls around college age were lesbians)
Dave: They shouldn't be allowed to have lesbian bridesmaids! That should be a rule!