Year of Living

Guys.. it doesn’t take much. My wife has been away for a week.. that seemed like a lifetime! Yes.. I guess I’m hooked! So I wanted to try and express how much I cherish her and make her really feel loved. Did it take a big budget? Nope, actually, all under 20€ and a whole lot of fun!

You start with 130 balloons and stay up all night blowing them up. Along the way you scare the daylights out of the neighbors, or should I say night lights as some of the balloons burst at 3am! Then you get some string and hang them in the entry hallway, elevator entrance and her bedroom. Followed by party plates to make the scene a festive one welcoming her home.

Love hearts on the lounge wall.. bunnies in the bedroom.. suggestion time..guys.. you know what bunny’s like to do and more love hearts above her head for when she wakes up in the night or morning.

At the entrance to the “love room”, a reminder of how it all started. The day she “dared to love her”. It was on a gift box/bag, that I most likely got as a sympathy gift after our official first date, in which I bombed disastrously!

P.S. If you really want to step it up a notch, you know how much women love for you to do things around the house! So I grabbed a cork board, some hooks, and made a “dohicky” for her to hang her earrings & necklaces. Right in front of the mirror where she gets dressed in the bathroom.

And don’t forget the lollies; women love candy. Now how simple was that?!?!?!

And then we played bunny rabbit until we fell over and slept

Maria has flown the coop again.. San Diego, I think.. and I stayed behind to entertain friends. Where is she exactly? You’ll have to ask her, or chase her on twitter http://twitter.com/mariasipka.. welcome to my world.. she forgot to give me a copy of her agenda.. comes home sometime Sunday night.. I think…

One of my visiting friends got really sick on Saturday & I played nurse maid.. I know.. I know.. I’m such a Charminguy .. and I’m so empathetic that this morning I decided to wake up with chills, pains, aches.. yeah.. what are friends for.. he got better & left for St. Petersburg, leaving his bugs with me! Anyhow, so I’m trying to sleep this morning and get some rest, when all I can hear outside are children, and the noise is growing by the minute. I look outside my window and I see the crowd! For a minute, I pinch myself to make sure it’s not an audience for the pope and I’ve got the red slippers on

Anyway, I start to hear band music and then the party begins!

A parade! God you gotta love Barcelona! What’s next?!?! Babe.. you’re gonna be so sorry you missed this one.. it was a lollie parade!!! Trucks chucker block full of lollies!! Being tossed out to the kids, thrown up onto balconies, even the grandparents were having a mad scramble for the lollies.. no worries.. they have no teeth.. so no issues with cavities

So we had marching bands, horses, lollies & more lollies, screaming kids scrambling for lollies..

..and it went on all day and into the night! As I’m about to go to bed, I’m still sick.. a little worse as a matter of fact.. but just the sound of the drums beating outside, and the thought of all those happy kids eating their bags of lollies for the next week, brings such a warm smile to my face.

P.S. Those kids don’t know how lucky they were Maria was out of town! They wouldn’t have had a chance if she was in the neighborhood

So what do you think she’s gonna say? What do you think she’s gonna do to me? To my credit, in the 14 months since we’ve lived together, and at least 20 months since I first started doing laundry with her stuff included, this is only my 2nd “foe-pa” The first one was when one of her white shirts got “slightly” darker due to being mixed in with some “darks”. I swear to you I’m a GREAT house hubby!

It was so weird! Last week I was doing the whites and I put this sweater to the side as I knew it couldn’t go into the washing machine. Yesterday though, when I pulled the clothes out of the hamper, I was in such a rush that I didn’t realize Maria’s sweater was caught up in the middle of the rest of the cloths. You can imagine my face as I start to hang the laundry and her sweater is now sized to fit a rag doll?!?!?

Oh well, you gotta look at the positive aspect of it, she left it behind so hopefully it wasn’t one of her favorite’s. Anyhow if our daughter has mums tastes, then she’s already got her first baby outfit

Sorry babe!!

Geeze babe.. with all that commentary how’s a guy suppose to get a word in edgewise?!?!? Welcome to my life as the proud, and newly crowned, husband to Maria Sipka

You meet your soul mate in a desert oasis in Marrakesh. What’s next? You soon pack your bags and move to Barcelona, I guess. Followed obviously by getting married in New Delhi, whilst literally flying by the seat of your pants! What?!?!? You mean this doesn’t happen to everybody? Huh?!?! It’s so much fun being Mr. Sipka That’s the only way to get noticed some days in the shadows of “The Community Girl”, and I do state that very proudly! How do I handle it when people joke about who wears the pants in the family? Oh that’s ok.. I’d rather take them off then wear them anyway It’s all in a days fun, and fun it’s been since this gorgeous creature walked into my life, handed me some spiritual books and turned my life upside down! Then again, she did warn me that I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.

Oh yeah.. did you get that part about the vows? We’re standing there walking around a fire, like it’s not hot enough living with this intense ray of sunshine 24X7 already, and we’ve got to repeat vows that we’re hearing for the very first time. So the Shaman tells me I’ve just agreed to financially support Maria for the rest of our lives, and she’s apparently just agreed to be my domestic goddess. I chuckle, and that’s when Maria screams out that she wants to change “vow responsibilities”. So hand me the apron and the ironing board sweetheart. By the way, did you note in the picture that she was leading me around the fire by a yellow leash? That’s not to mention the pink dog collar she put around my neck for some laughs back at the Snowy Mountains over Christmas. Actually, I look “pretty in pink”. Yeah, welcome to my reality! god I have so much fun with this woman!

It’s been a very short, not even two years, since I first laid eyes on her. We’ve since scared the day lights out of hundreds each time we’ve updated our facebook relationship status and one of us delays confirming . I guess that just shows you the power of community. ok, ok.. I get the picture.. but that’s it now.. we’re married.. so unless there’s a higher status then that.. no more scares.

As Maria started to mention.. a charminguy born in Lisbon, Portugal.. uprooted to Philadelphia at the tender age of 5.. back to Portugal at 26.. and now living in Barcelona. The spunky young lass was born in Bratislava, Slovakia.. uprooted at the age of 2.. stopped over and lived for a couple of years in a castle in Germany as her parents escaped communism, only to end-up terrorizing the young boys in Sydney Australia, then packed-up her bags to bust open the doors on the world at 29. Traveling the world, momentarily laying her head down to rest in Hamburg, Germany & Zurich, Switzerland, but mainly in seat 3A of British Airways, before announcing to me, on the back of a boat, on News Years Eve, one year ago, to catch a plane to Barcelona and find us an apartment. Oh yeah, and in Delhi last week, imagine my calm, cool and collected not surprised face when she announces to EO TV (LIVE) that we’re moving to India next year?!?!? Welcome to my world, it’s simply paradise!

So what is there to say, now that Maria has said it all? I guess my part in this story is to keep you laughing, to share with how both of us born on the same continent, traveled to opposite ends of the world, only to come back together on this side of the planet. Maria once had her palm read and she was told that she would marry “a man from the west”. Well, Portugal is the western most country in Europe, and even though I spent the first half of my life on the east coast of the US, technically, that’s west from Europe. And as a child, when she returned to Europe to visit family, she always did fly west. She may have flown in the opposite direction at first, but I guess the law of attraction pulled her back to me. Now I understand all of those fantasies, which I couldn’t figure out as a little boy, of why I was infatuated as a kid, about Australia, & Sydney in particular. Now all make sense.

So you’ve got the link to the wedding pictures, here’s the link to the honeymoon, and yes, we did the honeymoon before the wedding. Obviously (!?!?), seeing as we’ve always been fans of chucking tradition out the window! And I would encourage you to stay tuned, it’s still early days in this life of “bonnie & clyde”, “the Flying Wallendas”, and “bewitched” all under one roof!

Thanks for stopping by and please do share your own stories & thoughts with us as you read these captions.

We’ve been bitten twice now by the Facebook relationship status bug! First time when we were engaged it showed all our friends we were ‘no longer in a relationship’ and now more recently updating our status to married showed the same. Off course a flood of emails came with shock, horror and disbelief!

A Slovakian born Australian marrying a Portuguese born American in New Delhi, India. Sounds like an adventure. The video will do much more justice than me sharing the story with you but until we get hold of an edited version I’ll attempt to write a few words.

The honeymoon in Thailand was pure bliss. Four days of being deserted on a tropical island with white sand, palm trees, hammocks and amazing inexpensive Thai food. I managed to finish the adventurous Indian book I was reading to give both of us a taste of what we were in for. Every day we booked in for Thai massages and one day took a trip onto the mainland to ride elephants and do some local shopping.
We arrive in Bangkok airport around 8pm and our flight leaves for Indian around 2am. Surprisingly there’s a long queue of very colourful, excitable and luggage packed Indians waiting to check in 5 hours before hand! We decide to do some work in Starbucks rather than going into town and check in 3 hours beforehand - which is a record for me because I usually check in 30min - 1 hour before a flight leaves.

So we make our way to check-in and there’s probably around 12 people hovering behind the 3-4 check in counters. With big grins on our faces - we are about to get married after all - I ask the lady whether there is any possibility of getting an upgrade. I tell her we’re getting married in Delhi, show her some documentation and hope that we can have a comfortable seat for the 4-5 hour journey throughout the night. She doesn’t seem to responsive and as a matter of fact she starts to grow a worried look on her face. Another man walks over to see what’s going on and asks us to wait for 30 minutes! It seems that there are no seats on the plane. It’s been over booked. And there’s a chance we may not even get on the flight!

They manage to find us seats by reshuffling some other passengers to sit in the air hostess seats and I’m upgraded to a comfortable seat and JC is left to sit in the middle of the smelliest, misbehaved passengers he’s ever encountered. Afterwards he told me they were slurping, burping, farting and he got his first wif of what I was telling him about - the combination of Indian spices, onion and sweat. Welcome to India babe!

Arriving into New Delhi airport after circling the skies for 1/2 an hour - apparently our pilots were category 2 pilots and not trained to land a plane in fog. Somehow they managed to land the plane with 0 visibility. It was all white. You’d think you were still flying in the clouds and then suddenly you feel a big thud and a few bounces. Thank god we landed! And it was freeeeeeeeezing! Nobody told us it would be 6 degrees in this country. I’d only heard about how hot and sweaty it was. Dressed in summer clothes and thongs we kind of felt out of place with all the scarves, boots and heavy winter coats people had on. The first adventure was going to the toilet before going through customs. Absolutely busting to go I stand in queue, finally get into a cubicle only to find a squatting hole type loo. Great! And then the big surprise - no loo paper. I mean what airport has no loo paper! Fortunately I scrambled around in my bag - no tissues but JC’s socks came into double use after keeping my feet warm on the freezing cold plane trip here.

JC’s precession had already begun an hour ago. Dressed all in white/ cream with a burgundy turban (that was a tad small like an Indian maharacha, he had been entertaining the crowd of 400 or so riding a brilliant white horse on the streets with an electrifying marching band, fireworks, dancing and Sharman’s. Seeing the video afterwards - he looked like a stunned rabbit with his eyes glistening and in awe of what was happening and about to happen.

Bright reds, oranges and pink material draped over large canopy’s, strings of orange marigold flowers, pillows and lounges, carpets and so many people! Six ladies held up a floral canopy over my head and I managed to shuffle forward trying not to get the trinkets around my wrists caught in my dress. I was told Indian brides don’t show too much emotion. This was the one rule I had to go against. I was laughing my head off and occasionally my mouth wide open in amazement. Especially when I saw JC for the first time. The scene was something out of a fairytale. Both of us stood on a stage with people on each side telling us what to do. We were to be married by a Hindu priest accompanied by a two shamans - one had an orange beanie on his head These men chanted, sang, smoothed bright red powder onto our foreheads whilst bells and other sounds roared in the background. Some of the guests who flew in from all around the world, were dressed in local garb and others had western suits and attire. Camera’s flashed. And people just stared at an experience they’d never had before

After the initial ceremony we moved into a smaller area under a bright orange and pink canopy and sat on cushions cross legged around a ceremonial fire surrounded by offering to the gods. Close to 70 of our friends and strangers either sat on seats or stood capturing the ritual with or without their cameras. This was one wedding where there would be no shortage of photographs as we found out afterwards when checking our emails. For the next 30 minutes we threw a combination of rice, flowers and red powder into the fire worshipping the seven different gods. We exchanged vowels where I pledged I would do all the domestic duties and JC would bring the money in. I asked if we could swap We walked around the fire seven times, touched the feet of the priest - which is a great sign of respect, and shoved coconut jelly into each others mouth. I only took a small bite. I thought it would be quite unflattering to be chewing on a big piece of jelly with my cheeks all exploding. We laughed, giggled, made a few mistakes and before we knew it, we were man and wife with rose petals being thrown at us by our guests.

I knew JC was up to something when I didn’t see him on skype from 4pm onwards. My outlook calendar did tell me to not work past 8pm. I was running a little late too so I called to say I’d be there in 20 minutes. He asked me to call when I hopped off the train. Mmmmm…. I wonder what he’s planned?

I’m pleased to report the charminguy has again lived up to his reputation. After walking three flights of stairs excited to burst through the door I was presented with a big red balloon and a series of rose petals and a note asking whether I’d be his valentine. Above the note JC had wrote an incredibly romantic poem inspired by our honeymoon. As you can imagine for a highly visual and experiential person reading the poem and wanting to open the door was a juggle.

He opened the door and ushered me into the bedroom asking me to ‘take my clothes off’. Pause. Not what you think. In the bedroom the side table was converted to a shrine of rose petals, an orchard, a red candle and a bowl of assorted lolly pops from my favorite sweet store down the road.

The door to the kitchen/ living room was closed and my nose followed the aroma into the bathroom where a piping red hot bath awaited - again sprinkled with rose petals and tea light candles. I laid in the bath thinking ‘hey - this would be a great idea for a business. JC could co-ordinate a bunch of charminguys with various experiences for women who lack love and attention in their life and desire such an experience’. I shared this with JC whilst he fed me a variety of cod fish and meat croquettes. Another crazy idea of Maria to share his love with the world.

Dinner was ready and so was the dining table elaborately decorated with yep you guessed it - rose petals, love heart lolly pops and candles. A delicious three course meal and surprisingly not much conversation due to the intensity of the experience and soaking it all up, another wonderful charming experience to add to the collection of many beautiful memories.

Thanks sweetheart! I can’t thank you enough for how much love you’re capable of giving.

December 31, 2006 at approximately 23h50.. Maria decided it was to be the Year of Living! And what a year it’s been! A few days later I was apartment hunting in Barcelona, a few weeks later a Starfish named Linqia washed up on shore, a few months later the traveling was back on our agenda and as the years winds down to a close, America’s Dream Coach interviews the Charminguy before he hits the road for a South and Central American tour kicking off in Bogota Columbia and moving upward to Los Angeles before moving onto Sydney for our Xmas break. This year there will be no last minute surprise, the theme for 2008 has already been chosen. It’s going to be the year of celebration! Maria & I will be married in a traditional Indian wedding on February 6th, the opening night of the EO University in Delhi.

Stay tuned for more.. The Love Story revisited

Don’t worry; the pictures will be uploaded by Maria when she get’s a chance. She’s in Vegas and I’m back in Barcelona.

Maria & I have had much less than desired time together as Linqia takes off and I’m piecing together my new passion career with Strategy in a Day & Charminguy.com. Last Sunday, after attending a week long workshop in San Francisco, Maria & I took the Sunday afternoon off. We were able to convince the navigation system in the Hertz rental to find us a beautiful coastal road to Santa Cruz. However, little did we know what havoc a pumpkin festival could reap on the local traffic in-between the highway and route 1. It must have taken us almost 2 hours to make a trip that only 24 hours later would take us 15 minutes.

Fortunately, Maria & I are “into” each others company, and considering we hadn’t had much “Quality Time” of late, I put my “Acts of Service” talents to practical use. Now mind you, I should pause here to point out that whilst her primary love language is “Acts of Service”, her secondary is “Quality Time”. As you guessed it, I turned a bad situation into a home run!