After the wedding, everyone headed to the apéritif in the next town up the coast of Lake Geneva, Coppet. For those not familiar with this event (a common event in European weddings), it's like a cocktail hour for everyone, preceding the wedding reception which is for a smaller crowd, usually at a different location. Once there, I awkwardly alternated between listening to the conversations of Etienne's friends, and wandering off alone while the wedding photos were being taken. Everyone chattered on in French, German, and Italian around me, and I just quietly fell back to observe.
Finally, when all the photos were done, we were back in the car again, on our way to the reception at a hotel in Divonne, France. I didn't know what to expect other than eating all night. The seating chart called for me to be seated at the head table between a friend of Etienne's who turned out to be a shoe designer, and a young Bulgarian who didn't speak French. The idea was that the two English-speakers would be able to talk to each other, but as I learned prior to the wedding, this guy was 24. I had my doubts; even if we did speak English, there was no guarantee we'd have anything to talk about, with a 10 year age gap. Turns out, I had nothing to worry about, because this guy was in the same field as my ex-husband (Management and Information Systems), working at CERN. Yes, That CERN. We had plenty of pleasant, intelligent conversation, much to my relief. Whenever we weren't chatting, one of the two little girls, Lila, kept commanding my attention (and my iPhone), so her mother got to enjoy a couple of courses instead of eating and managing a four year old AND a two year old. Before I knew it, it was midnight!
The thing about Quebecois/European wedding receptions is that they tend to be structured differently than North American ones. My experiences of wedding receptions is that we eat, speeches happen, there's cake, etc. and then we're on the dance floor by 10:00 or 10:30 for the first dance. Not so in the experience outside of Anglo-North America. They have all five courses and do games or show slide shows in between. So you literally can sit there all night eating. If there's dancing, it usually not started until after midnight.
But whatever the format, in all experiences, where it is had, the alcohol flows freely! I stopped drinking by about 2 am, but Etienne, who was quite drunk, kept on going until nearly 4 am, when I finally hauled him off the dance floor, away from the 20 or so people still left partying (very drunk bride and groom included). We had to check out of our room by noon, so when we woke up some 5 hours later at 10:30, Etienne was still drunk (as were several people, I found out). We packed our sorry, tired selves back up in to the car, and headed across the border, back to Onex for much needed sleep.
When we finally stirred at close to 4 pm, I started the daunting task of packing, as we're leaving Switzerland tomorrow, and we had a lot more stuff than we arrived with. All of this while tired and hungover.
But it was a great party...
...Wish you were here!
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