The biggest challenges of what I should to wear to the wedding surprising came down to the issue of socks.
Suit
Half the content on Picasa must be wedding themed. A quick search for “plantation wedding” or “louisiana garden party wedding” brings up photos of the groom wearing either seersucker or linen vest/pants combos in either blue or beige. Tay actually turned me on to seersucker earlier since he sometimes wears it to court on muggy days in Indiana.
However, this being Stuttgart, where the weather is rarely pleasant and seldomer hot, seersucker is an unknown material, and I didn’t want to pay to ship a suit here from the US (since whatever I ordered could need tailoring). I liked seersucker though, so I asked all my groomsmen to wear seersucker pants and white dress shirts, to be jazzed up with teal blue ties.
I started trawling european online clothing shops like Gilt and Asos. I eventually found a sky blue linen vest and pants ensemble from an Italian label and had it shipped to my office.
Tailoring
The pants were way too long. Stuttgart is full of tailors, many of them immigrants judging by the names. It’s actually a surprising lot for the size of the city. Must be a high demand for tailoring here. Anyway, I found a tailor about ten minutes walk and went in and put on the pants.
I wanted the cuffs to fall a higher than than the usual length but both the tailor and another customer both chimed in and talking about it agreed it was too high and literally talked me down a bit. Which was good advice.
Shoes
We struggled a lot to find the right shoes. Brown leather, naturally, but something a little lighter, a little lower, a little more casual that I could also wear to work. Lots of brown leather shoes in Stuttgart. Went to about a half-dozen shoe shops before settling on a pair.
Socks
Saori had first mentioned wearing my shoes sans socks a long time ago when we were first talking about what we could wear to a hypothetical wedding, and I had in my mind higher hemmed pants and cool shoes and no socks. To be fair, it’s a trend but mostly in the workplace among some millenials.
Back in the hotel room with Tay as I was dressing, we broached the sock topic with me trying on the socks of varying heights. The socks I brought weren’t working, the no-socks route was shot down by everyone with the exception of the hairdresser working on the bride and bridesmaids, who was also, apparenty, incredibly tattooed. Tay ran to his room and brought back a selection of socks and we picked out a pair together.
Accessories
Tay presented me with a very nice watch from Junkers, a German automatic. But I have such small wrists the band didn’t fit, so I wore my old Swiss army watch I salvaged from the Ross Dress for Less a long time ago. I did upgrade the band, however, to match the caramel leather of my belt and shoes.
Tay picked out a tie for me, gold with a subtle paisly pattern in relief. But we rejected it, foolishly, as too dusty and went with the garish yellow, leading later to much hand wringing (mine) and wasting my family’s time at suburban malls.
I bought a practice tie in Stuttgart and found some success after an hour or so of going between youtube and the bathroom mirror, so I was satisfied I could replicate the feat. But it was a close thing. I cut my time too short working on my speech, so it was that twenty minutes before the bus was due to leave I was sweating and working fast. Hold the bow with the left hand and tuck the flap with the right? Cut the red wire or the blue? Tick. Tick. Tick.
I got it. But as soon as I did I got a knock on the door from Tay. He looked great and Chelsea, too. “Can you help me with my tie?” I assured him I would (actually he had it 90% already) but it would have to be on the bus. Grabbed a to go bag Saori had requested and hurried downstairs, totally forgetting some gifts I had brought, as well as to comb my hair.
The Bus
The fantastic wedding of Dew and Yoshimi had lurked nearly unspoken in the background of our wedding planning. One thing we really liked was the fact that they had provided a bus which took everyone there and back: it added a bit of building excitement, a bit of a road trip, and it meant nobody had to be a designated driver.
When we took Kim and Tracy’s offer, we knew they were an hour plus from New Orleans, but we wanted to keep as much as possible to the city to provide an added amenity to our guests and a place for us to enjoy with our families. And as long as one stays within walking distance to the French Quarter, there is really no need for a car to get the most out of a Big Easy weekend. $30 gets you an uber or cab from the airport. So providing transportation to the wedding and back was a high priority for us.
I started working on it, actually, as soon we announced the wedding. There are not so numerous ways to get to Prairieville from the French Quarter, and they are all really expensive. Here is a quick breakdown:
- Charter bus
- Charter yellow school bus
- Party bus
- Bunch of Ubers
- Big limo
As we got more RSVP’s we realized that our number of riders was going to be about 15-20, which turns out to be a really annoying number: too many for private cars and really few for a bus. I solicited bids from five or six bus companies, asked for discounts, and put up with the very. slow. response time from the charter school bus company, which must be the actual school bus company.
In the end, after my family tried to tell us we were working too hard and spending too much on this project, we were happy and surprised when one day they took charge of it. I handed it off to Tay and mom, although Tay took lead.
It was good timing too, since less than a week later the school bus company came back with the best price for an air conditioned bus. I forwarded the email to Tay with the recommendation he go with it. It was going to be cheaper than the 8 Uber trips we were going to need.
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