Booked! And a New Vendor Link

So we finally booked our reception event staff, who will pick up the food for our pan-Asian (mostly Chinese and some Filipino and Vietnamese) dinner buffet from Chinatown, set up all the food and the drinks at the venue, and serve and clean up. Awesome!

The vendor is Gina's Party Staffing, a small, woman of color-owned company that I found, bizarrely enough, the old-fashioned way: by calling a number posted on a bulletin board at the Piedmont Grocery. I was attracted to Gina's use of 'diverse staff' on her business card--it's important for H. and I to have an ethnically diverse, culturally competent wait staff who won't be freaked out by the whole suckling roast pig (lechon) we'll have at the reception, or the very diverse (in terms of race, gender, language, sexual orientation, etc.) group of guests we'll have at our wedding. Gina and her crew totally fit the bill, and she's got lots of Filipino friends so the lechon will be no problem!

I vibed with Gina immediately when we talked on the phone, and as I explained in previous posts, that 'realness' that we've found in the vendors that we've chosen to book for our wedding is (wedding vendors take note) extremely important to us. We didn't want to go with a corporate, impersonal staff for our wedding who wouldn't make it feel homey and welcoming and fun. Gina had great referrals and was super-helpful from the get-go. We booked her and her team (we'll have four waitstaff and a bartender as well) the other night and I'm so excited to work with her!

Moving Forward! Getting Sh*t Done!

So we finally got our invitations out and the wedding web site up--a free thing through TheKnot.com that actually seems to do what we need it to do. And I don't want to jinx it so I won't say we've already booked her but we are meeting with the potential lead event staffer for the reception tomorrow night to make our deposit and sign the contract. We're getting five servers to help with picking up food, setting up the buffet, serving drinks (only beer, wine, soft drinks, water and sparkling cider instead of champagne) and clean up.

And we're really starting in earnest to plan our honeymoon to Belize, which really does seem like one of the most amazing and beautiful places on earth. I swear, the whole country is like a National Park! It's a tiny country, less than 9,000 square miles (by contrast, California takes up over 130,000 square miles) and on all the maps I look at it seems like every region of Belize has numerous wildlife preserves (including ones for sea tortoises, manatee and jaguars!), national parks and Mayan ruins that are being protected. It's amazing that such a small country is doing so much to protect its environment and wildlife, while still having a thriving tourist industry, while in the US we can't seem to develop so-called 'undeveloped' areas fast enough to suit our crazy lifestyles. I'm sure there are many places in Belize where people's homes are threatened or changed by the tourist trade, but relatively speaking it seems like a fairly 'pristine' (to sound like a travel guide) place.

I'm SO excited about these developments you can't even know! I've been waking up at like 5am (withOUT an alarm, mind you) the last couple days to add new things to add to our to-do list, checking out how many hits our web site has gotten, or reading about places to visit in Belize in this book we bought the other night, cheesily entitled Adventure Guide to Belize. And I'm happy to report that I'm not stressed out about all this, I'm actually quite happy about it all.

I can't wait for the wedding and for our honeymoon. Now I finally understand why people want to get married this way. How much frickin' fun!