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This past weekend, thanks to a awesome friend (she knows who she is), I was hooked up with all access passes to the 2007 Champ Car Races in Houston.  Normally, watching racing live isn’t my thing.  How many times can you watch a bunch of car pass in front of you for 10 seconds or less over an hour and a half?  This was different.  This was all access.  Not knowing just how far I could go with it, I was determined to find out.  As it turns out, I was able to get pretty far–whether or not I was supposed to is/was a different story.  Anyhow, I spent the majority of the race sandwiched between Team Australia and Forsythe Racing in the actual pit area–not behind a crowd barricade.  Because of my position, I was able to get some really nice pictures of both Austrilia and Forsythe pitting at various times in the race as well as some random pit lane shots.  (If you check out the gallery, you’ll see a couple continuous-mode pictures shots taken in real-time over a pit.).

At the end of the race when Sebastien Bourdais crossed the finish line (first) his team began to rush began to cross over the pit track and rush the race track.  Shortly after that, the news media crossed over and went onto the track..  Shortly after that, (can you guess what’s next?) yours truly crossed over and was standing on the finish line next to Sebastien Bourdais,  Graham Rahal, and Robert Doornbos–1st, 2nd, and 3rd respectively.  To end out a great day, we headed over to the winners circle for the trophy presentations and snap a few last shots.   Pictures from the race can be viewed here.

Last weekend, my co-worker of over 3 years finally takes the plunge and gets married.  Both of their families are originally from Nigeria so they’ve decided to have two wedding ceremonies: A traditional Nigerian ceremony, and a church service ceremony.  The traditional Nigerian ceremony would be my first.  Upon arrival, I was a bit worried about fitting in with the crowd given that I was not very familiar with the customs, and I was forewarned that this would not be like a wedding I’d ever been to before.  Fortunately, upon arrival, people took notice and were pleased that we were trying to fit in and began to explain some of the process and what was about to go on. [ I should note that I was given proper Nigerian wedding attire by my co-worker. This provided a somewhat silent introduction to some of the people there that we were trying to fit in, but didn’t exactly know what to do.]

The overall experience, be it new, was interesting.  The first hour and a half of the ceremony appeared to be more about the families of the bride and groom getting to ‘officially’ know each other and to accept the other’s son/daughter into their families.  During this time, the bride and groom were not present.  The groom shows up first with his friends in tow ready to prove his worthiness to marry his bride to the bride’s family.  The bride’s family then puts the groom and his friends through a series of tests (dancing usually) and questions to see how serious he is about marrying their daughter.  Once the tests are complete and acceptance is given, it’s now the bride’s turn to do the same for the groom’s family.  Once acceptance is given on both sides, the bride and groom sit together for various readings and ceremonies, prior to them being joined.  This is a bit of a consensed version of what took place.  The actual ceremony took a little over 5 hours to complete.  Pictures from the wedding can be viewed in my gallery here.

Congratulations Tunde & Seun!