Wedding Omaha
In the beginning of March, the King and Queen traveled to Omaha on their way to California to attend the wedding of one of the Queen's postdocs. Jennifer had moved on to Chicago where she met Arun who is from Omaha. Their wedding was a combination of Catholic and Indian (like from India) traditions.
This is a photo of Jennifer getting her henna applied. Each of the women had a chance to get their hands decorated with henna. The bride and groom had hired a professional `henna' person who came with books of designs to pick from. She did all the designs freehand and it took her over three hours to do the legs and hands of the bride.
The process was supposed to be only for the women but the King decided that he wanted a henna decoration also and as a result most of the man got there hands hennaed also. Henna has been used since the Bronze Age to dye skin, hair, fingernails, leather, silk and wool. Henna is a flowering plant that is ground up and is placed in contact with the skin. You leave it there for a few hours and then it dyes the skin and remains visible for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks depending upon how good the person is who does it.
The King's hand is on the left and the Queen's is on the right. The King was told that he picked out a very feminine design.
The wedding ceremony was very nice. Jennifer was in a sari that was made in India.
A number of people that were in the Queen's lab at NIH came including Kath Clark from Britain. She wants me to say Britain rather than the United Kingdom because she has not yet recognized the new description.
There were two cakes that we had. The first was served at the groom's brother's house the day before the wedding and looked like it had strawberries on steroids.
The second cake was at the wedding reception and featured two bicycles since both Jennifer and her husband both bike.
Sisters and cousins of the groom.
The Queen with a few of the young people.
The young people got up and danced a lot and they seemed to know all the Bollywood routines.
There is a pedestrian bridge that spans the river that separates Iowa (Council Bluffs) and Nebraska (Omaha). It is called the Bob Kerry Pedestrian Bridge and is named after the Bob Kerry who was a Senator from Nebraska. He got 18 million appropriated from the federal budget for the bridge and this got his name on the bridge.
We walked across the bridge with Kath Clark and her boyfriend and entered Iowa.
The view from Iowa looking back into Omaha.
Warren Buffet made quite a few of the people in Omaha millionaires and the city is doing quite well financially. There are quite a few museums and art galleries. We visited one very large art gallery which was in an old warehouse with many artists doing lots of interesting things including one potter who was making these huge urns. They weighed over 2 tons and cost about $3000.
Another artist had gotten a commission to make a huge statue of a basketball player to be placed in the main square downtown. The scale model of the player is shown.
Just so you can see the scale of this project this is the actual shoe of the basketball player.
For those of you who do not know French this translates as `Men are pigs'.
One artist had these incredible paintings with an Alice in Wonderland theme.
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