Flight to D.C.:
After boarding the plane following a 45 min delay due to lack of crew, the pilot said "There are tornadoes in Washington, so we may be delayed...". There were gasps and grumbles, but I didn't care much. Why? Because I had been bumped up to first class: comfy chairs, magazines, free alcohol and pretzels, the works. Our delays totaled 4 hours in the end, though we were quite lucky to have made the trip at all considering the awful weather conditions in D.C. (due to Ivan, turns out).
Wedding:
We arrived at 11pm and met up with family in the hotel bar, where a whisky costed $7.75 and a beer costed $5.50....totally cheap, in other words. My cousin Matt, the groom, was drunk, as was my spastic cousin Bryan. It was a short but fun night. Both the wedding and reception, held the following morning, were elegant and fancy-pants. They were held in Georgetown, of course, at a small chapel and a sophisticated riverside restaurant/hall. The event was fairly standard, with a few bits of unusual entertainment (my fav.). One of the Bride's sisters had to read a Biblical passage while her daughter smacked around the microphone. A little girl hollared and laughed in the back of the church throughout the wedding...so the priest had to speak over the echoing noises of her and strange thumps and crashes every once in awhile. During the reception, my cousin in-law and I were tapping our glasses to the beat of a song and, simultaneously, both of our glasses cracked and exploded. Oh, and the appetizers were OUTSTANDING...really. The whole thing was over by 5:00, which left us with 8 hours for post-wedding hotel cousin debauchery. By the end of the evening, the following had occured:
-Lots and lots of drinking (of course)
-gossiping about Matt's biological father's family (with whom he has recently reconciled his differences)....they have two murder/disapperances, one crazy sexual accusation to Matt himself (and his brother), one instance of impregnation then run away (his father), and LOTS Of other weirdness.
-snorting whisky off of the table
-dumping beer on Matt, his brother, his sister, his mother, our cousin, etc.
-snorting vodka
-wrestling: matt was flipped in a 360 at one point and hurt himslef
-kickboxing: my brother came away with a nasty bloody shin
-Flippy cup
-Extreme flippy cup: smacking the cup as hard as possible at someone and then chugging a beer in seconds (which ends up more on your clothes than in your mouth)
-Joints
-Three noise warnings...and a "final warning"
-me taking a break for diarrhea (black diarrhea, to be exact)
-"Hose vomit": my brother tried to block a vomit with his clenched hand, causing the vomit to squirt out the sides in a stream
-The best man forcing Matt to visit his bride, who had left an hour or so earlier
-Screaming "Rooooooth" down the hall towards the room of my grandmother, Ruth
All in all, a wild evening. The next day we ate breakfast, went to the new WWII memorial--very nice--and visited JFK's grave. Then it was time to fly home.
Flight Back to Detroit:
The flight home was delayed, of course. This time the delays were in increments; they kept pushing the departure time back by 15min. We were finally able to board after 2.5 hours of this. Turns out that the reason for the delay was a broken bathroom. That's right: 2.5 hours for a broken bathroom. Funny thing is, when an attendant announced the boarding (in broken english), she said "And those sitting in rows 25 to 33 should not sit there becuase that is the smell source. Please sit behind those rows." Smell source! I got a good laugh, and felt bad for those seating in the back of the airline (and good for myself in first class still). So the flight may have been delayed due to noxious odors, not a broken bathroom per se. When we entered the plane all of the overhead fans were on full blast and the plan was quite cold due to some airing-out process. And there were faint odors of sewage even up front, so I can't imagine what it was like in the rear.
Now I'm home. Yep. Georgetown is nice and elegant, but a little too much so for my tastes, especially concerning shops and residents. My cousins are crazy, especially matt. My brother is injured. I'm tired. Then end.
