GC and I were in Montreal for the weekend, for his cousin’s daughter’s wedding. It was my first Jewish weddingĂ‚Â and I have to say it was a lot livelier than your average Protestant wedding. They sing and dance and break glasses on purpose! At the reception they do this crazy thing called the Hora, where the bride and groom sit on chairs which are then hoisted up by the guests, over their heads, and danced up and down while everybody dances in a circle around them. It’s all very exciting. And then they do it to the parents of the bride and groom!
A video is worth at least a thousand words, so here you go. This isn’t from the wedding we were at; I just grabbed a random hora video off youtube.
Another thing – you’ll never starve at a Jewish wedding. You eat constantly – the day before the wedding, immediately before the wedding, after the wedding…endless feasting! It never stops!
(I’m feeling mildly hungover and significantly fatter today.)
We didn’t just eat and drink. We also walked 20 km on Sunday – up to St. Joseph’s Oratory (where we climbed 279 steps) and back to GC’s parents’ house…then we went to the cemetery to visit his ancestors’ graves…then we took a subway downtown and walked all over downtown and Old Montreal. (I love subways. I wish we had one here in Ottawa. They’re so fast and easy, plus if the weather’s bad, you’re somewhat protected from it.)
We got home about 1:30 this morning.
It’s hard for us to get away for a weekend because of all the animals. My son looked after Duncan, Simon, Kazoo and Oboe. GC’s son looked after Rosie, Billie and Lester. The animals were very happy to see us. Simon and Oboe stuck to me like glue for the first hour of the day.
But it’s all good preparation for next summer, when we go to Newfoundland! The creatures need to have some experience with us going away and coming back so they don’t go into mourning when we disappear for a week. (Me too. I need to practice for that.)
I went to an orthodox Jewish wedding a few years ago when my cousin’s son, who has converted to orthodox Judaism, got married. It looked like this, except that the men and women danced separately. Those chair dances looked quite scary, especially the women’s ones, because the women who were holding up the chair didn’t look strong enough to me. I kept expecting the bride to come crashing down. That would have been a disaster. I wonder how often that happens.
The lack of a subway is one of the things I don’t like about Ottawa, compared with Montreal and Toronto. I dislike buses. I liked the Otrain when I used to live close enough to a station to be able to take it regularly.