Married!

We got digital copies back from both our photographers last night and promptly stayed up till 2am looking through them, selecting some for our print album, and picking some out for a web album so the blog entry can now be posted!

The perfect California summer day started for the groomsmen like around 7am. We intended to go to sleep early after the rehearsal dinner the night before but instead made a late night rendezvous to In N Out. Not a bad place to spend my last meal as a single guy! Luckily our getting ready consisted merely of showering and changing, although I did actually also stop by a hair salon on the way out since my usual hair routine consists of just letting it dry in whatever condition it feels like.

We started off the morning with some pre-wedding photos at Stanford, which seems to never disappoint. We eschewed the tradition of not seeing each other before the ceremony in favor of practicality to keep enough time to take photos. As we went through the photo session, a bus showed up and dumped lots of Asian tourists in the quad, who then proceeded to join in the photo taking festivities. There might be lots of random blogs out there with pictures of Ruth on them, but here are some from our photographers:

With that out of the way, we went and prepared in our respective rooms at the church while the rest of the wedding participants arrived and other guests started trickling in. I was feeling fine until we stood in this little room all lined up ready to go outside when I suddenly started to get really nervous about forgetting where I was supposed to be at what time, but it was show time soon enough and we headed out for the processional. The bridesmaids had already come down before we went out so we didn't have to wait long and it was pretty spectacular when the doors re-opened, light flooded into the dim church, and the silhouette of Roothie and her dad appeared to walk down the aisle.

The ceremony started with some awesome music from our worship team and a wonderful reading by Merisa from Colossians 3:12-17 before Mike gave us a message from it about forgiveness and thankfulness. So my posture is generally pretty lousy so I was trying pretty hard to stand up straight. But then my back started getting tired from trying so hard and Ruth later told me I had this serious, stoic look on my face the entire time. But we got through the message which was followed by the exchange of vows and rings. Ruth had forgotten to move her engagement ring off her finger so the target finger was already occupied and then it got stuck on her knuckle, but we eventually got through it.

It was a pretty fun ceremony because our wedding party and us got to move around a bit instead of standing in one place the whole time. By this time we had already started lined up at the foot of the stairs and made a circle up on stage. But now came the tricky part where Ruth and I went to light the unity candle and they broke into lines as we walked forward. We lit the candle and spent some time talking, which was kind of strange since everyone was looking at us, before proceeding back down to hug our parents. As we walked past, the wedding party reformed the circle. It's a good thing we had talented groomsmen and bridesmaids! The parents part was pretty emotional so I didn't really say too much to keep from crying, of course. But after that was the pronouncement, kiss, and just like that all done!

The reception at a nearby golf and country club was a ton of fun even though we had to improvise a lot. We ran extremely short on time, barely making it to all the tables, didn't have time for any dancing (we had planned to have an hour for it), skipped the bouquet and garter toss, and found out a few minutes before entering that Ruth's dress was too long to waltz in. So we just did what we could manage to: a slow, middle-school style dance to start, some entertaining toasts, visits to all of our tables, an entertaining guestbook-populating photobooth, and a comical attempt to cut cake. The only real disappointment was not being able to knock everyone's socks off with our limited waltzing abilities after we had practiced a few times during the previous week, but everything else was great, albeit going by in a flash. The guestbook is remarkably entertaining as we had very creative guests. The food was terrific and the atmosphere was amazing!

For those who are planning bay area weddings, we were absolutely thrilled with all of our vendors and we even managed to keep our wedding under budget! The vendors were:

- Photographer: Ching Liang and Jay Tsai
- Flowers: Never Forget Flowers
- Stationery: Olio Style using Envelopments
- Dessert: Sugar Butter Flour
- Photobooth: Party Booths
- Videographer: John Ling, a high school friend and all-around film dude
- DJ/MC: DJ Osvaldo, a college friend/roommate and DJ extraordinaire

We uploaded a number of photos in a Picasa web album and a slideshow follows below. And in case you guests didn't know, we get all the copies of photos from the photobooth too, so we may have some good blackmail material if you were up to no good in there...

Thanks to everyone who came and made it an amazing and memorable day!!

Aussie Aussie Aussie!

Still waiting to aggregate all of the wedding pics so I'll post about that later and instead provide an update on our honeymoon. :)

If you haven't seen the preliminary wedding pics yet on Facebook, you can try Ruth's Xanga post or this flickr set from one of our photographers.

Australia was a sweet two weeks and we spent our time in three different areas: Sydney, Melbourne, and the Great Barrier Reef.

Sydney
First stop was beautiful Sydney with its famous harbor and Opera House. After landing early in the morning, the preliminary event was taking a nice ferry ride out to Taronga Zoo where we had our first encounter with the Aussie wildlife:

The animals were alright, but we had to pay extra to get close to the koalas and they were all sleeping, so we had to keep an eye out for better opportunities.

We went back to the hotel to take a quick nap before a fancy dinner that evening but ended up sleeping FOUR HOURS on account of jet lag and woke up 75 minutes after our reservation time for the posh restaurant of Tetsuya's. They thankfully let us come late and enjoy the experience of the 3+ hour meal across 12+ courses, including some amazing desserts:

We couldn't come to Sydney without visiting the opera house, so we spent the second night at the symphony that is Mahler 6. Despite my best efforts, I don't think I managed to stay awake for more than 20% of the performance, but I think I had some pretty good mitigating circumstances (a 90 minute session without intermission, lots of food and drink beforehand, and still suffering from jet lag). The parts that I remember were pretty good.

Last on the agenda was a day trip out to the Blue Mountains area and enjoy the laid back environment. The mountains were fine and dandy, but the highlight was stopping by Featherdale Wildlife Park where we were able to get up close with almost every animal, even getting to pet koalas and feed kangaroos! There were so many animals there that we even saw some koalas that weren't sleeping and were actually moving around:

Melbourne
We actually didn't spend much time in the actual city, instead taking to the road and going along the Great Ocean Road, which is sort of like Highway 1 in California, but on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. While Sydney was nice, sunny, and in the 70s, the weather wasn't as cooperative on our first day. After renting a car, it also took a while to get used to:

Thankfully they also drive pretty slowly, so I was able to get the hang of it, eventually making it out to our main objective by the end of the day, the Twelve Apostles. The weather was still pretty bad, but we spent the night close by and had enough time to pay a quick visit in the morning as the sun was coming out:

We spent the next night at Phillip Island, the main highlight being able to watch the little penguins come in from the ocean at night back to their nests. I had signed us up months in advance for the Ultimate Tour, which gives you a private viewing right on the beach, but the tides were high and the winds were strong, so we had to settle for front row seats in a different area. Photos were also not allowed, but here are what they looked like at the zoo:

We spent the final day lounging in Melbourne, including a trip to the Crown Center. I didn't spot any poker pros to play against, so we settled for some time at the slots and managed to win a few bucks before going down 20 for the night :(

Great Barrier Reef
The final stop after cold Melbourne was tropical Queensland where we stayed near Port Douglas and took a trip out snorkeling. It was amazing to see the size of the corals out there and we even rented a digital camera equipped for underwater photos from the tour company, Wavelength. It was pretty difficult to just stay still enough to take a pic, much less try compose something interesting and make sure lighting was sufficient, but definitely something I'll want to try again in the future:

Okay, so I kind of cheated and the crew actually took that turtle pic since mine didn't turn out as well. But we did get to see a few turtles, a couple sting rays, and lots of coral and fish.

Our last organized activity for the trip was a day trip through the Daintree Rainforest region. It was raining that day, but we had a good time trekking through the forest and seeing some crocodiles along the river.

The last day we spent lounging on the beach and just plain relaxing. I even accompanied Roothie to spa for my first ever spa experience. It was actually pretty fun and especially relaxing, although I'm not sure I'd go back again on my own!

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We've caught up on some movies (Ratatouille and Potter) and laundry since we've been back, but now I have to go to work tomorrow! :( I miss Oz already!

More photos online at our Picasa web album: