Damascus, Syria. I am on a one month backpacking trip through the Middle
East. In a hostel in Damascus I share a dorm room with an English girl named
Gigi. She introduces me to an American girl, Jennifer. The three of us go out
for dinner that night and never see each other again for the rest of our lives,
or so we thought. But it was not meant to be like that.
Ten days later I run
into Jennifer again, waiting in line to get on Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Two
months later she asks me to meet her in Paris end exactly two years after our
first dinner in Damascus we got married.
After we spent over a year flying back and forth to see each other we made
the decision that we should live together for a while to get to know each other
better.
So I sold my car, rented my house out, boxed up the rest of my stuff
and flew to the big country for six months. She didn't drive me crazy and my
kissing slowly improved (more tongue, less tongue...) so she told me I could
stay.
At first we thought it best to do the K1 visa thing ( faq ) but after posting some
questions in a newsgroup it became clear that the best thing to do was to get
married and do the DCF thing ( faq )( immigration for dummies )
in Amsterdam.
But that meant we had to get married!
So what should we do? Best thing
maybe was to fly to Las Vegas and ask Elvis Presley whether he had time for a
quickie. But after a bit of research I found out that it is pretty simple to get
married in California, so why go to Nevada?
Next thing we found out that
Jennifers very old (very old!) uncle Al who lives in New Jersey was going to be
in town on the weekend of our two year aniversary, for a barbeque beside her
uncle Larry's pool. So why not join the party and get married right there?
To make a short story even shorter, Larry didn't want to barbeque so he hired
a caterer, and some twenty five people were there on that little barbeque for
uncle Al that wasn't a barbeque, including my mother and three sisters who flew
in from Holland.
It was a great day.
So what happened next?
Peter's first visit to the
consulate.