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I went to an Egyptian wedding last night with my friends Mohsen and Waheed. It was in the province of Banha in the Nile Delta, in a small village. The bride and groom basically just sit on a raised stage while everybody comes up to congratulate them. Apparently they had been sitting there for a good four hours when we got there around 9:30 pm. The second I got there I was whisked up onto the stage to meet the bride and groom. Then I was brought back down off the stage and given a mic to make a speech! It was so fast I hardly knew what to say, which I think was something like "Egypt is beautiful, I love it." The men were dancing while the women sat up near the stage. Somebody picked me up onto his shoulders danced around like that along with two others which were also on their friend's shoulders. The groom, named Hassan, was hoisted up too to come dance with me. They took us to eat at the groom's house, rice and meat. Soon after we went back to the dancing area the bride and groom came down from the stage to go back to their house. The custom is to give the groom money so that he won't have to work for the next couple of weeks. In the village, the mother of the bride will come out the next with the blood-stained bedsheet and wave it around for everybody to see that her daughter was indeed a virgin. The bride and groom were 21 and 25 respectively. After the bride and groom went home, I stayed around talking and drinking tea with a few other men there, and at about 12:30 we came back.  It was a short fun evening. Hopefully I'll get to see more weddings in the future! There weren't any musicians, just a DJ with a big soundsystem. It must have been tough to get all that gear into the village on those small dirt roads, but they managed somehow.