Arusi! The Wedding! I'm officially married... in Iran

We had a beautiful, ideal Persian wedding last night. Kat's mom planned it wonderfully (in only 2 weeks!) It was colorful, vibrant, and lively. We started with the ceremony in Kat's grandma's apartment. Decorated beautifully with flower arrangements and a traditional Iranian Arusi layout. Filled with an extravagant fruit/vegetable art piece, a giant silver mirror, bread with colorful spices, honey, candles, flowers, a crystal sugar ball, Iranian pastries, eggs, a Koran and two other traditional (poetry and history) Persian books. Each item signifies something different for the life of the bride and groom.

Kat's dress was beautiful!! but i can't tell you any more about the dress, you'll have to wait until to July wedding to see it :)
For the ceremony, Kat and I sat at the edge of the traditional Persian arrangements. Then her aunts, uncles, cousins and my family held a beautiful gold nylon cloth over our heads and took turns rubbing sugar cones wrapped in elegant lace material over our heads. Kat's cousin, Shahriar then conducted the ceremony in Farsi, explaining the significance of each of the items in the arrangement. Kat's other cousin Layla (who flew in from Florida with her adorable 6 year old twins, Parsa and Donya, for the wedding) then translated it for us in English. Kat and I dipped our finger into the glass of honey, fed it to each other and exchanged kisses. I proceeded to put Kats new gold band on her ring finger and she reciprocated with my new gold band that we bought at the Bazaar in Tehran. Next came the wedding gifts! Each family member from oldest to youngest took turns bringing up their gifts to us. We got beautiful jewelry, several gold coins and cash money.
okay, fine we'll give you a small taste of what we looked like at the wedding :)

After dozens of pictures with each of the family members and friends, we all migrated downstairs for the reception. A group of traditional Iranian drummers and one guy playing an Iranian string instrument were performing live. Kat and I made our traditional entrance to loud 'lalalala' chants and clapping. Everyone then hit the dance floor for some traditional Persian and Kurdish dancing to the live music. The music was awesome, fast beats mixed with captivating melodies.

We danced up a storm for an hour, my brother, mom, aunt, and even my dad joined in briefly, along with all of Kats beautiful cousins and some of her aunts and uncles. After an hour the live drummers left and the DJ took over the music duties. I was a nervous reck up until this point because I had written up a page long speech to give at the reception... in FARSI! eeeck, a page long speech in Farsi in front of nearly 100 of Kat's Iranian family and friends. I was terrified but also up for the challenge and excited to express my deep feelings and gratitude to the family and Kat. I had been practicing the speech dozens of times over the past few days, trying to get each accent and pronunciation of each Farsi word correct (with the help of Kat, her mom and dad). The English version went smoothly and the Farsi was broken but i think it came out well (probably 80% of the people understood 80%) of the speech :). I'll post the video once we get DSL.
I gotta run, must pack for our 3 day trip to Shiraz tomorrow so I'll finish up the rest of the wedding details later. I'll leave you with a picture of the gorgeous food layout we had: