Filed under: North America, Macedonia, United StatesToday is my ten-year wedding anniversary, sort of. Does it make sense to celebrate a wedding that was a secret, five-minute affair that was capped off at a nearby Taco Bell over chalupas and 99-cent churros?
I asked my wife to marry me just days before joining the Foreign Service in 2002 and we had to set a wedding date without knowing what country we would be moving to or when we would depart.
When you join the Foreign Service you start out in a two-month long training class called A-100, which takes places in Arlington, Virginia. At the conclusion of the course, you're given a flag representing your assignment and, depending on the job and the country, you can spend the next one to nine months in job and/or language training.
This uncertainty makes it difficult to deal with landlords but even harder to plan a wedding. Nonetheless, we planned an August 10 wedding in Chicago, and tried to bid on jobs that entailed as much training as possible. In late March, I was assigned to Skopje, Macedonia, with six months of Albanian language training. This meant that I'd be in the U.S. for the wedding, so we initially felt relieved.
But we soon learned that nothing happens in the Foreign Service without a mountain of red tape and logistical hurdles. Our departure for post was scheduled for early October and old Foreign Service hands, including "Dink," our kindly A-100 course coordinator, told us that a mid-August wedding might not leave enough time for the bureaucracy to get Jen (my wife) on our travel orders.Continue reading A Traveler in the Foreign Service: My Secret Foreign Service WeddingA Traveler in the Foreign Service: My Secret Foreign Service Wedding originally appeared on Gadling on Mon, 19 Mar 2012 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | Email this | Comments
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