Last week I had the pleasure of going down to Guadalajara, Mexico to shoot Annie and Jose’s Wedding/Graduation Celebration/Thanksgiving Love Fest. Annie is an American girl from the northwest going to Medical School at the University of Guadalajara, where she met Jose, a native of the city. This trip was so great! When most people think of a wedding in Mexico, they think warm sandy beaches and beautiful resorts, but Guadalajara has neither beaches nor fancy resorts. It was “real” Mexico. And it was so fun to see and experience. The trip started off with a red eye flight from PDX at 9pm the night after Thanksgiving. We landed in GDL at 5:00am, cleared customs and hoped in a cab. The only directions I had was an email Annie had sent me in Spanish that I showed to the driver on my iPhone. It was still dark outside, we drove around for 40 minutes and finally he stops in what looks like an industrial back alley and says “aqui, aqui” and we get out. Uh…I’m really hoping this is the right place and I knock on what I think is the door…and out pops Annie, with a bubbly “buenos dias!” Whew! we made it! We walked into the house and it was gorgeous, everything remodeled and super nice. A really cool backyard garden and super sweet decor. Never judge a book by its cover!

Jenn and I were dead tired so we laid down for a couple of hours and caught up on some sleep, when we woke up, Jose took us for a little tour of the barrio (neighborhood) and we went to a really cool market where you could order all kinds of food and juices and random stuff. The photo will kind of give you an idea of the area. This looks like an alley, but its actually a main road, a very busy road. Crazy. I had something delicious, but I have no idea what it was. We were the only Gringo’s for miles and my Spanish is, well, lets just say I needed Jordyn’s Dora the Explorer book in a bad way.

After hitting up the market, we loaded up and headed out to a nearby lake and this cool little water park where the pools where filled with water from a natural hot springs in the same location.

The day was pretty chill. Hanging by the pool, eating, singing…I love that in Mexico, people just break out into song and dance and bring instruments with them everywhere. Very cool vibe.

Finally, it got dark and we headed to our hotel and got some much needed sleep.

The next day was the wedding. We got up early and headed back over to Annie’s house and walked down to a hair place so her nieces could get some cool hairdo’s. This was the outside. I loved how the chairs were lined up for the kids.

On the way back we walked past some folks selling shirts in front of their house.

Finally, we arrived at the ceremony location. My good friend and fellow photographer Tiffany Brown is very good friends with Annie and has been following and documenting her life for over 15 years. Check her her blog recent blog posts about Annie’s pregnancy and delivery, some ridiculously awesome photography by T. Brown. Anyway, so Tiff had a bunch of prints made up from all of her time spent with Annie and Jose and tied them to the trees leading up to the ceremony.

Jose was a bit nervous leading up to the event, but this was no regular ceremony. They started off with a magician to entertain the crowd. Everything was in Spanish and I didn’t really understand a lick of what he was saying, but it was still a great show and I laughed a lot.

Their daughter Elena wasn’t going to let anybody else hold her during the ceremony, so she stood up there with them as well

After the vows, Annie and Jose and their son Panzon performed some capoeira, which was really awesome. They are damn good!

Then the reception, as if a magician and capoeira wasn’t cool enough, they had a 20 piece mariachi band, a belly dancer, then a samba band and samba dancers:

Oh and a jump house for the kids too. They funniest thing of the nigth for me was when Tiffany came running over and said, “Craig! You have got to get into the women’s bathroom! There are acrobats stretching in there!” So I went and there were indeed dancers stretching in the women’s bathroom. At this point, I’m thinking, man can this get any cooler?

Here is a cool shot of T. Brown in a sombrero:

They capped off the night with a fireworks display.

Whew! Here are a few more photos, click on any of the images to see a larger version.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 4th, 2009 at 8:14 pm and is filed under Editorial, Other, Weddings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.