Officially Married (Sort of)

Arriving to this new country (for my girlfriend at least), we had only a couple of weeks to prepare ourselves for the wedding, this is in addition to getting our apartment up to shape; buying all kinds of necessary stuff like a washing machine, cloth hangers, groceries, etc. For the wedding we had to buy cloth for me the bride and for Ale, two sets of cloth for each night of the wedding, and some more less formal cloth for the preceding nights.

In reality the wedding started almost a week before the actual wedding day; every night family, friends and neighbors gathered, in our family house (that of my mother), and we had food, music and dancing, we call these nights: Ta'aleel, they constitute a warm up for the final two days of the wedding. They started with a small number of people, and this number increased each night, up to the final.

The final days of the wedding are the official ones, the ones we sent people get invitations for. The first night we had a dinner followed by the ceremonies of the Hla'a (Shaving) and Henna.


These are the tradional ceremonies of the Palestinian Arabic wedding.

In the ceremony of the Hla'a I basically get my beard shaved in public.

In the Henna ceremony they pain our hands with Henna.

My girlfriend was not so happy with here making during this night, they had over done her make up, and she was upset she did not look at all like herself, I have to agree with here, I barely recognized here when she came back from the ladies saloon. This happened in spite of us making very clear that we would like her to look natural during the wedding. Well at least after the fiasco of the first night, they got the message, and here making for the final night was more natural, and quite to our liking.


The final night of the wedding was held in a wedding hall, in the style of western wedding.


I had my suit and tie and the bride wore her white dress.


My mother had the choice of who to invite for the first night, but I made the calls when it came to the wedding hall, we, mi and my bride, wanted to have a small party, with only close friends and family invited, in total we had 130 persons, including the kids, and we had a lovely party.

Mauge managed to get in touch with a friend from Bolivia who lives in Haifa, close by. Actually she never knew this woman before, but they had a common friend, and she invited her to our wedding, she arrived with her husband, who is from New Zealand, both are working in the World Baha'i center in Haifa. It was nice for Mauge to have someone to talk to in Spanish during the wedding.

Mostly Arabic music was played, but I had prepared a compilation of Latin songs on a CD, and we had Manu Chao during the warm up, and later we had Juanes 'A Dios Le Pido' to dance, which was a big hit, and I found to be the best part of the party, a lot of people joined to dance, it was the closing song of the party, and unfortunately the photographer had shut down his equipment so it was never filed. I personally enjoyed dancing to this more than any of the Arabic songs that had been played in the wedding.


Now in the next post I will explain why I am only 'sort of' married officially.