A Wedding

On my street are two Christian churches. They are always busy with one activity or another. Tonight at the church two buildings down from mine, An Arabic Evangelical Church, it was a wedding. There are weddings there often and I always miss things. When I look down from my balcony the trees obstruct my view. So tonight I grabbed my camera and went down to have a closer look. This is what I saw.

The bride and groom are up on the altar, turned into a stage. They faced the congregation. The minister? is on the right side of the picture and the videographer is on the left side, video taping the entertainment. Yes, entertainment. This wedding lasted over an hour and had singers and a guitar player. On the walls to the right and left of the central cross, you can see big video screens, where a live feed from another camera was projecting the whole ceremony onto those screens. Down the center aisle all that white netting is hiding the myriad electric chords that go to the various cameras, lights and recording devices.

This fellow was outside in the courtyard, connected to the inside by all those chords covered in white netting. He has four scenes he is monitoring on the screen to the right as well as a fifth screen which is focused on the singer who is entertaining at the moment. He is directing his team on the inside via the microphone. It was a very sophisticated set up. I have seen set ups like this at this church for other weddings as I have walked by. I can only surmise that video taping the wedding is an important thing to do here. I slowly walk by and gawk and the stuff that I see.

After the ceremony the bride and groom get into a decoratd car like this one. There will be several of these decorated cars carrying the family and friends to the reception, often held in one of the big hotels nearby. The car with the bride and groom will have some of that white netting connecting the flowers on the hood to the flowers on the trunk, and wrapped around mirrors and handles. I have seen cars on the street after a wedding with so much netting that you wonder how the driver can see where he is going. There is lots of horn honking and noise making as the wedding party proceeds to the reception.