This weekend my friend Agustin invited me to go to his friend's wedding as his guest! The groom is his friend from high school, and the bride is a Brazilian woman from the south of Brazil. It was so so fancy, and probably in the most beautiful, expensive, high-class event space in Santiago! I certainly wasn't expecting to end up there, but it was very fun!
flower petals outside the church
After a short Catholic ceremony in a small church, we went to a villa/pavilion/restaurant hall on top of Cerro San Cristobal. Cerro San Cristobal is a big hill in the middle of the city that is great to hike up and has views of sprawling Santiago. We had appetizers and fancy cocktails on trays, then sat down to dinner. All the food was small fancy portions on small white plates! Then they served us a hazelnut liquor mousse with fruit, then coffee with a tray of marzipan candies.
Because the bride was Brazilian, half of the guests were her family from the south of Brazil. They were mostly blonde Brazilians of Western European descent (which I am not used to seeing) because the south has a lot of German and other European immigration, and almost none of the African immigration. It was cool to listen to the wedding speeches in Portuguese.
We had another dessert - wedding cake, and a three-tiered table with platters of fruit, flan, tres leches cake, cookies, chocolate mousse, manjar pudding, and more. Then the dancing began! There was a brazilian samba group that came out drumming and wearing Brazilian soccer jerseys. Then there was Chilean and Brazilian dance music for the rest of the night! Around 3:30 the servers emerged again with mini-hamburgers and cups of soup, probably as a "don't get too drunk" midnight snack.
The samba band!
What was interesting about this event was that it is one of the few times I have been around Chilean families, and people of all ages. Some things were different - like the Portuguese and the samba band - but otherwise it could have been a wedding or family celebration with my family in the states. The way that people relate to each other, the milestones they celebrate, the father of the bride's sentimental speech (of what I could gather in Portuguese) are pretty much universal.
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