About the Photos:
- We are in the process of picking out official wedding photos
for the professional photo album. If you want to see this
album, you'll have to see it in person after we get it.
- Here are some snapshots Nancy
took. (Nancy is my mother-in-law.)
- I have some prints of some snapshots my mom took.
They're not scanned yet, hold your horses. Scanning is
super-boring.
- I have photos from the honeymoon from my camera. There
are only about a billion of them, excuse me for not posting them
just yet.
Stories:
Setting out for Portugal
Aquinas and I bought plane tickets to Lisbon on different
airlines. We tend to try to stretch our vacation money.
We used some United miles to pay for his ticket, and then bought the
cheapest ticket we could find for me, which was through Iberia.
Maybe you see where this story is going. Already.
We drive off to JFK, put the car in long-term parking, and head
to Aquinas's terminal, since his plane leaves first. He's
flying through Frankfurt. Go figure. So, we check him in
and then sit down and have a nice relaxing snack in bright shiny
terminal 1. After a while, Aquinas decides it's time to go
through the security line and head towards the gate. I
blithely tell him goodbye and go to terminal 8/9 (which is under
construction).
I wander up to dim crowded terminal 8 (past the construction),
and look for Iberia's counters to check in for my 6pm flight.
I follow a horde of people towards the orange and red sign.
Some Iberia lady says, The 6pm flight is cancelled. That's all
she says. Then I wait in line with a bunch of people speaking
Spanish and Portuguese. (My flight goes through Madrid.
Ahem. Was to go through Madrid.) Nobody in line
is quite sure what was meant by "flight cancelled". I'm hoping
there's another flight - no big deal, right? But some
passenger wanders up to the front of the line and back, and she says
that the airline is sending everyone to a hotel in New York City for
the night.
Because yeah, that's where I want to be, in New York City, while
Aquinas is waiting for me in Lisbon, so we can drive to our hotel 2
hours outside of Lisbon and check in. On the first
night of our honeymoon. Gah!
But maybe there is another flight, right? Please?
So I stand in line, resisting the urge to try to sprint back to
the other terminal and somehow get Aquinas off the plane, so we can
both be miserable in New York City, on account of having forfeited
his ticket. I get more and more worried. I look at my
watch, and think, Okay, his plane is taking off in... thirty
minutes. Okay, his plane is taking off in... five minutes.
Okay, his plane is taking off... right about... now. Oh
bother!
***
Someone says, "Anyone going to Madrid and then to Rome?
Okay, you folks come over here, we'll put you on this other plane
we've got going to Rome." But too bad, I'm going to Lisbon.
Via a hotel in New York City, apparently.
Finally, I'm about to cry, I'm at the front of the line, I still
don't quite know what's going on, but I know it can't be good.
I drag my carry-on bag up to the counter, holding my blasted Iberia
ticket and my ID. I say, quietly and desperately, "Please
tell me you're going to put me on a plane today." She
says, "No, we'll send you to a hotel for tonight and put you on the
plane tomorrow."
That did it. I'd had enough with the almost crying.
I well and truly cried.
If I'd been someone else, I'd have been hopping mad, but I just
couldn't feel mad. All I could think was: I'm going to be an
entire 24 hours late for my own honeymoon.
"Why?" She told me that the plane was
supposed to be coming from Madrid, but that it had never left.
My plane was stuck in Madrid.
"Is there another flight you could put me on? Another
airline?" This is an airport, after all. Someone
has to be going to Lisbon, or Madrid, or heck even Frankfurt.
Then she said, "Are you traveling alone?"
Sob! Well, yes, that's the whole problem, isn't it.
She didn't know.
Then she asked me, "Where are you going?" And I said, "On
my honeymoon, for God's sake!"
***
Thirty minutes later, she had authorized and printed out an
entire new itinerary for me: now I was flying on American, changing
planes in London and flying British Airways to Lisbon. I would
still get to Lisbon ahead of Aquinas.
I gave her five dollars, which she tried to give back. I
made her keep it: I didn't know what else to do to thank her.
I went to the terminal 9 half of terminal 8/9, and found the
gate. Then I realized I should call Mom and tell her my flight
information had changed, in case Aquinas noticed that my flight had
been cancelled. I didn't want him to worry -- like I'd been
doing for two hours.
So I bought a phone card from the newsstand - big mistake.
Horribly expensive. But I'd left my phone card at home,
because who needs a domestic phone card in Portugal? Since
then I've realized how utterly stupid I was, so to make up for it I
got a 1800 number and rechargeable PIN tattooed on my arm so that
this never will happen again. Just kidding.
***
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| Happy to be on a plane! |
***
Lest you thought the transportation snafus were over and done,
well, they weren't. Time for round two: Heathrow.
My plane across the pond was fine. Nice, actually: I sat
next to a friendly Indian guy and saw a half-decent movie on my own
personal screen. Reaching the connecting flight was the
traumatic bit.
The friendly Indian guy told me that there's this fast train from
Heathrow to London, so that I could actually step out and see
England for a while, if I had time between flights. I hadn't
computed exactly when my American flight would land, versus when my
British Airways flight would take off, but I figured I didn't have
enough time to leave the airport and come back. I like to be
where I'm supposed to be well ahead of time, so I probably wouldn't
have left even if it had been possible. But it was a nice
idea, I thought.
The idea turned out to be completely laughable. Layover,
hah!
I landed with something like half an hour to get on the other
plane. Me being in terminal 1 and the other plane being in
terminal 3, or something like that, this was not as easy as one
would have hoped. It was almost like a reality TV triathlon or
something:
First! You must follow the signs for "connecting flights," being
careful not to be trampled, elbowed, or even slowed down by the
teeming hordes of your fellow passengers, who have also just gotten
off the same bloody huge plane! This task is made more
difficult by the fact that you've only just woken up, it's the
middle of the night according to your internal clock, and assuming
you've reset your watch properly, it's actually 7am where you are
standing!
Next! You must get on the bus, that's right, the
bus to the next terminal! No efficient little trains here,
no way to perambulate to the next terminal, no, there's nothing you
can do but wait in line for the bus! And to get to it, you
have to go down stairs that don't even move! Can you beat the
clock? Look! Your plane is beginning to board now!
Finally! You arrive in the terminal where you plane might
or might not await you! But your troubles are not over yet, no
they're not! There's another line! It's the security
checkpoint! Once you get past, you'll have to sprint toward
your gate, which is, naturally, at the extreme end of the bloody
terminal! It's the very last one! Don't look now, it's
time for takeoff!
But what's this? There's nobody boarding! Has the
plane left? Tell me it's not true!
It's not true. "The plane hasn't started boarding yet,
ma'm. It was late arriving, and it's still being cleaned, so
if you could just stand right over there for about fifteen minutes,
you can get on as soon as we're ready."
Is this considered a victory or a defeat? Our contestant
had hoped to be just in time, but in fact she was not! She had
plenty of time! Judges, what say you?
***
Round three. Lisbon, Portugal. Thrifty auto rental.
Aquinas and I do not know how to drive a car with a manual
transmission. There are very few automatic transmission cars
for rent in Portugal, and they are expensive. I reserved a
small one for us at Thrifty at their Lisbon airport location.
When I met up with Aquinas at the Lisbon airport (after I had
explained my traumatic experience and he had complained about his
long layover in Frankfurt), we went looking for the rental car
desks. We found them. But we didn't find Thrifty.
We kept looking. More rental car desks, but still no Thrifty.
We went back into the terminal and asked at the customer service
desk. The nice guy said, you have to call them, and then they
come pick you up. Okay. So he gave us the number and
sold us a phone card. Lucy Day, naturally, gets saddled with
the actual pay phone phone call. The person on the other end
did speak English, but the phone or the connection was awful and I
almost couldn't hear her. I managed to indicate that we were
at the airport waiting, and had a reservation.
Someone came in a blue shuttle and took us to the Thrifty office,
somewhere in Lisbon.
We filled out some papers, they checked their parking deck.
They didn't have our car.
They offered us a manual transmission car. Um, no good.
Stupid Americans!
They said that Thrifty only had four automatic cars in the whole
country, and that ours was late getting returned to them. They
said they would take us to our hotel and bring us the car in a
couple of hours. We said, we're not staying in Lisbon.
They said, okay... Where are you staying? We said, in Obidos.
They said, Great! That's where the car is!
So they drove us to the car.
It was not the small car I had reserved, but they said they would
charge us the same price. Cool, we thought, we're getting a
better deal. So we all drove off happy.
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Later on, we realized that bigger is not better.
The
medieval streets of Obidos were not made for the Ford Focus
SE Wagon. Of course, that would have required quite a bit
of insight, but what I mean to say is that the streets were
pretty narrow. |
And driving a bigger car means... burning more gas. In the
US, this is not a major concern, unless you drive an absolute hulk.
Gas is just gas. In Europe, gas is like gold. Smelly,
liquid, flammable gold. I think the price there was about the
same as the price at home - but their price was per liter,
not per gallon. (There are 3.78 liters in a gallon, so
their gallon price was like four times ours!) And the Euro at
the time was worth about 1.25 dollars, which only made it worse.
So, Thrifty turns out not to be so thrifty after all!
The Exchange of Rings
Nobody smashed the cake or stepped on my dress. Well, maybe I
stepped on my dress a little. The worst thing that happened,
and it was actually pretty funny, had to do with the exchange of the
rings. We wrote everything we wanted the judge to say, and emailed
him the text. The rings part looked like this:
Repeat after me: I give you this ring
[Aquinas] I give you this ring
as a symbol of our love and commitment.
[Aquinas] as a symbol of our love and commitment.
Repeat after me: I give you this ring
[Lucy Day] I give you this ring
as a symbol of our love and commitment.
[Lucy Day] as a symbol of our love and commitment.
Somehow the judge misunderstood this to mean we wanted to say each
part twice, because I had it on the page twice, whereas I only meant
for us to say alternating lines. So the exchange of rings was
very... *emphatic*.
The Happy Saga of the Dress
It's a long story, actually, what my mom and I went through to
find one I liked.
We went to one store that was closed. The next store we went to was
really fancy, and there was a "consultant" who helped me with like
everything, and the dresses were all fancy expensive designer
dresses. But the dresses were mostly all about the same style:
strapless or spaghetti strapped bodices with a skirt and some
decoration. There weren't any that looked like dresses to me. Like,
with an actual bodice, or heaven forbid, sleeves.
The only ones with sleeves were dumb looking ones for fat people, or
for weddings that happen in cathedrals where you can't show any skin
on your upper body at all. Well, I didn't try any of those on, but
they told me "oh, sure, we can add a sleeve onto any of these
dresses" and they showed me the kind of sleeve they could add and it
looked annoying.
Anyway.
There was one dress I kinda liked, I think I only tried on three
there. But get this, the one I picked was a sort of a demo. It
hasn't been accepted into the product line. It is being tried out at
this one store only.
So, I picked like the weirdest one in the whole store, I guess.
That one was ok, but it was going to be like $800, and it was going
to take forever to order it, and there may have had to be
alterations on top of that. It had some things I liked, but not all
the aspects I was looking for. I didn't want a train, I did want
sleeves, I wanted a V-neckline, and a V-waistline.
(The dress we bought has all those things. And lots of pretty
decoration. And, it was not so expensive.)
The store we went to after the fancy one was a small place with only
one staff person there, and the dresses were really overdone cheap
things. I wouldn't have wanted to wear any of them. I tried a couple
of things on, and found one with sleeves (sleeves that didn't stay
up on my shoulders) but decided my dress had to have sleeves or I
wouldn't be happy. Then we went home for the day.
The next day, we went to a store in my neighborhood that had been
closed before. They had a large back room with a large selection.
Their dresses weren't all the same. They had unique sorts of things,
as well as the prevailing style which I had already seen enough of.
I was able to pick several things that were my size (and a couple
which were a little big but could be adjusted).
The one we bought was actually the first one I tried on from that
set. But there were several that were interesting, and might have
worked, and had sleeves and stuff. There was even an Elvin, Lord of
the Rings style dress, long flowing white thing. I didn't try that
one on, though.
It was nice too, because the 8's fit me pretty well. My dress needs
to be taken up a little in the shoulders, but I'm told that won't be
a problem. Actually, we are replacing the skirt, too. The skirt it
has on it is made out of netting, which is okay, but Mom and I think
it would look better if it were cloth, so we're making one (or
having one made or something).
Oh, and it has cool covered buttons on the back. That was another
thing I wanted my dress to have. They're just decoration, it has a
zipper underneath the buttons. Covered buttons are little
knob-looking things that are covered with the cloth that the dress
is made out of. The hole is on a shank underneath.
So that's the saga of the dress. I more or less plagiarized it from
an earlier IM conversation I had, so the sentences might be a little
choppy.
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