05 May, 2008

La Boda de Memo y Sabina

One of our workers has been gone the past week (and will not be there this week either due to the constant fiesta-ing) for his wedding which was just this Sunday. Weddings in Oaxaca are a pretty big deal. Like I mentioned before, they can go on for days and involve a lot of preperation and food. We arrived around 5pm or so and when we got there right away we were served these special breads with a cup of chocolate.

Once we started in on that plate we were given a little cup of mezcal and then the main dish--rice with turkey and a bowl of mole with tortillas. You can see all the plates in the photo below.


The most interesting thing about the wedding was watching all the traditional costumbres that were going on. The men and women sat apart from each other. Mole was served from a big vat:


And then once the bride and groom arrived, there was this long procession in which they had to shake so many people's hands and then sit down to eat. The whole time they ate they were being filmed. At one point they started filling up bowls of this stuff I think is called egaditos and is basically scrambled eggs with either real or organ meat, onions and chiles. It looked kinda gross:


But it was really cute to watch the bride and groom feed it to each other with tortillas, though in all the photos I took they didn't looked so enthused, but I guess that's because they had been eating all day, since sun-rise in fact. Though we didn't stay long and left before the dancing--which apparently everyone was like "Why are you leaving, aren't you going to stay for the dancing?"--it was a very interesting time and a peek into something a lot of tourists don't get to see.
Anyway, in the photo below you can see the women chopping up the turkey to be served with the mole. It was like seven women all chopping at once with big knives and turkey grease flying everywhere. Sweet.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I wish I could be there. I love the first pic of Memo and Sabina, esp. the reflections on the glass behind them--you almost get a 360-shot of the scene surrounding the newly-weds.

How was the music? Let me guess: Oompa, loompa, oompa, loompa ... putukutukutukunf! :).

verg