And still we found ourselves entering the long and laborious circle of preparations – locations / attire / guests / flowers and so on. And moreover, we started all these almost a year before the wedding took place – just like the good old Bridal magazines advice. However we did try to organize most stuff ourselves, and avoid the trap of buying and consuming too much stuff luxuriously offered by the prospering wedding industry.
First, we found a little nice restaurant in Schwarzwald, that we fell in love with – carrying the romantic name of Zuckerbergschloss (the Castle on the Sugar Mountain). What a lovely place to get married into.
Then I had some interesting experience when looking for the perfect wedding dress. I really didn´t fancy looking like a princess, even if the magazines shouted out loud that it´s the only day in one woman´s life when she should look like one, corsage and trail and veil and so on. Also I wanted to spend a very down-to-earth amount of money for the one-night dress – while still looking like a bride.
So I started the quest through the bridal shops. The first shop in a city near by featured a turkish shop-lady who seemed reluctant when she heard my budget, and barely got herself to look for a couple of dresses, actually quite nice. I must have been her charity case of the day. While I was trying them on, she pressured me condescendently that I should buy one right now, otherwise with this cheap price they will be gone very fast. I didn´t want to make her sad or seem ungrateful , but still I went along to other shops. Finally I found a charming one with kind shop ladies who presented the perfect dress to me and declared I looked like a „greek goddess”. Well, I bought it, even though it was above my budget – who wouldn´t like to look like a goddess then?
Planning the wedding ceremony was equally interesting. My fiance and I had long talks about having or not a religious ceremony. I am orthodox, while he was neither baptised, nor a big fan of churches or priests. In my Romanian circle the obvious solution was to get him baptised as orthodox and have a nice traditional orthodox wedding ceremony. The outlook was more than frightening to him, after I explained how a wedding takes place in the orthodox church – although harmless, it can indeed look funny to a non-orthodox. The cherry on the cake was when I told him, half joking, how young people getting baptised will be thrown naked in a big bowl with holly water – with godparents and whole family joyfully assisting. True for small babies, not necessarily for grown ups – but my fiance didn´t want to hear anything about it any more. I guess I would feel the same about some ancient religious ceremony where humans were sacrificed for the gods. So we dropped the idea and I wasn´t sorry for that – somehow I never dreamed about a church wedding myself.
The alternative was Marry Man – a young and nice master of ceremonies, who interviewed us enthusiastically on our meeting and living together and seemed genuinely excited about the whole story – even though he probably hears hundreds of similar stories in his job. Marry Man staged a nice, simple and romantic ceremony, with him telling our story to the guests, our exchanging the rings and some live music in between. All in the open-air pavilion of the restaurant. We loved it.
Another challenge was our guests list. Hey, this was about as strictly done as the Oscars´s guest lists. I was caught up between the Romanian tradition of literaly inviting everybody you know, and our wish to have a small, intimate wedding with only the closest ones. The compromise was a reasonable list where the majority of guests were Romanians, even if our wedding took place in Germany. However names kept on popping up on my side of the list, while my fiance´s face when I was adding dozens of new names on the list was priceless. And for a good reason too: he was the one to do the accomodation arrangements for all our foreign guests.
For all these, he was repaid at the wedding with a bunch of jolly romanian dances – which he had to go through more or less willingly.
- To be continued -
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