It’s Sunday morning, Feb. 7, and members of the wedding party are straggling in slowly to sit around the pool in the sun and recover from the 12-hour wedding extravaganza yesterday. Will is splashing happily in the pool, and Rick is sipping water in the shade.

 The wedding day began yesterday with Will cementing his new friendships with Max and Fred, the 5- and 7-year-old sons of the “best boy,” as they called their father, a university friend of Rob the Groom. Will and the boys ran wildly through a huge empty room in the hotel/nunnery, perhaps once a chapel, now a performance area.  Fred and Max fascinated Will with stories of their school uniforms in London, where they wear a tie everyday to school and a “jumper.” Seemed totally wild to him.

 We then dressed for the wedding, which began at noon in the ornate 16^th century Temple of Santo Domingo. The elaborate cathedral was nearly entirely gilded inside, even its fluted columns glinting with gold. Popes, cupids, angels and early church fathers covered the arching ceiling. As it is a major tourist destination, tourists wearing shorts and sporting cameras rather rudely wandered up and down the aisles during the ceremony.

 The ceremony was entirely in Spanish, with Rob even speaking his parts in flawless Spanish. The bride Elizabeth was gorgeous, in a classy, form-fitting silk gown. Since bride and groom are both journalists (Elizabeth a photographer for AP in Beijing, the groom a TV producer for Aljazeera based in London) the place was bristling with top news photographers from around the world – Agence France Presse, AP,  Getty – all scrambling like paparazzi to photograph their friends’ wedding. It was a wonderful scene.

 After the mass, which Will weathered beautifully in his little pinstriped blazer that Rick said made him look like a rock star trying to dress nicely – we left the church to find a Mexican band and huge, 8-foot-tall dancing puppets depicting the bride and groom. Women in colorful Mexican costumes handed out tiny green pottery cups and poured mescal for guests in the blazing sun. The square swarmed with trinket sellers, beggars, tourists, the wedding party and tourists snapping photos – it was quite a scene. Eventually led by the band and the bride and groom, those of us wearing high heels tottered our way down the cobbled streets back to the hotel, where we gathered for the civil ceremony in one of the hotel’s grassy courtyards.

  After that champagne, followed by “mescalitis” or margaritas made with mescal, a multicourse meal featuring Oaxacan specialities such as mole, another live mariachi band, tequila, toasts, dancing to everything from raggaeton “Gasoline” to old Madonna standards. There was even a reporter and photographer from the local press doing a story on the acclaimed Mexican journalist (Elizabeth) getting married in town. Will alternatively danced and chased his friends – all of them wearing Lucha Libre Mexican wrestling masks and swinging small rubber chickens – gifts from the bride and groom. Helen, Mike, Rick and I sipped tequila and took in the scene.

 

 Will logged more than 30,000 steps on his pedometer. Finally, about 9:30, he couldn’t take it any more and asked to go to bed. Since our room was right next to the action, he bathed to the sound of the now-returned mariachi band and wrote three pages in his journal before falling asleep with the music still blaring.

 This morning, Will declared it was the best wedding ever.