Posts Tagged ‘International Wedding’

May 2012

The last time Cephas and I were in Malaysia together, my mom took us to see the wedding venue we'd booked after extended discussions about the inadvisability of holding the wedding dinner at a house in the jungle.

(Among the various benefits of a venue in the midst of luxuriant tropical jungle, there was a drawback: the place had no kitchen facilities, not even a microwave.

"What if the food gets cold?" said my mom.

The venue coordinator tried her best to be helpful: "Oh, don't worry. So long as the guests are hungry enough, they'll still eat even if it's cold.")

We'd settled on a rather more practical option that satisfied both my parents' desire for a certain amount of poshness, and our desire for somewhere unstuffy where our guests could relax and hang out. That is, a country club that offered horse riding facilities (sadly, not included in the wedding package), with some greenery, interesting architecture, a koi pond—and crucially, multiple kitchens on site.

The venue coordinator was a polite man in his thirties named Syamsuddin. He listened with immovable solemnity to my mom's description of the theme of the wedding, taking notes on a clipboard. He was attentive but not enthusiastic: he seemed to be nursing a secret sorrow.

"My daughter wants to have a nyonya-themed wedding," said my mother. "You know Peranakan? My mother is nyonya, so we want to reflect that in the style. Maybe match the flowers—I was thinking bird of paradise, tie with pandan. Nowadays everybody wants their wedding to be unique, you know?"

Syamsuddin nodded in understanding. "People feel boring with the normal way," he said. "Next month I have a wedding out there in the gardens. 200 guests. We're putting the chairs out there, an arch for the ceremony. I ask my client what back-up plan they want if it rains, they say it won't rain. Continue reading Zen: Defending Joy

Posted in: Planning, Planning: Journeys, Wedding Undergraduates | 19 Comments »

May 2012

Elisabeth: It’s All Really Happening

Today you guys are in for a rare treat. It's Intern Tuesday, times two. This morning we have Elisabeth, she of the conversion to Islam and super super long distance wedding planning, giving us her once a month long form update on her wedding. (She has a date! Congratulations to Elisabeth! Clang the bells of glee!) Then this afternoon we have Madeline here with a post so lovely it will make your eyes and heart fill. I'm in love with today. Let's begin our mediation on distance.

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Amin and I sat down to take the first step in planning a wedding: creating a guest list. This was the first wedding planning thing we ever did. We did it before we were even engaged. It was exciting. Look at all the people we love! Think what a great party this is going to be! That first day, we put down over 300 people, but over the intervening months we have, without too much bloodshed (yet), narrowed it down to something closer to 220, and we know that many of those will probably not be able to make it. So, from a mammoth list, we have entered the realm of sanity. (Don’t get me wrong. I know this is still a huge list. But Amin has more than a hundred family members, so there are limits to what we can chop off.)

We knew the next key task would be to find a venue, so once the engagement was official, that was where we started. And quickly discovered that there’s not so many places in London that accommodate more than two hundred people. Who knew. So while all through the Christmas holidays I trolled through wedding websites for venue options in London, we also cast the net a bit further afield and began to look at Dubai and Pakistan, where we hoped we could find something closer to our perfect imaginary wedding.

Unfortunately, Pakistan is too far, and politically tricky, for my American friends and family to be willing to brave it, plus we knew we were going to have a walimah there anyway (a sort of post-wedding-reception reception), in order to accommodate the Pakistani family who won’t be able to make it to the wedding proper (and to make sure we get to fully enjoy as many different cultural traditions as possible). Dubai turned out a) tough to arrange when nobody lived anywhere near it and b) almost as expensive as London if we went with the easy options. So after months and months of looking at options all over the world (we even checked out possible destination events in Greece) we ended up coming back around to London, which at least had the virtue of being geographically intermediate and a place where one of us at least had a home base.

Of course, the above paragraph simplifies what was actually a grueling months-long process where we seemed to come up with ideas again and again, only to find reasons they were impossible. Increasingly we talked about just inviting twenty people and doing something small, because it seemed like we wouldn’t be able to have the wedding that we wanted and also invite everyone that we wanted. But one of the very very first things I ever said was that I wanted to be able to have everybody there, so cutting the list more than we already had seemed like too much of a compromise, and I resisted vigorously. There must be some place in the world that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg and can hold enough people for a rockin’ party. Continue reading Elisabeth: It’s All Really Happening

Posted in: Planning: Journeys | 23 Comments »

May 2012

Wordless Wedding: Lauren & Aidan

* Lauren, Wedding Photographer & Aidan, Philosopher * Photographer: Gabriel Hacker * Soundtrack for reading: "Strangers" by The Kinks *

One sentence sum up of the wedding vibe: A Scottish wedding, homegrown with lots of love, and a few confused/amused/eventually very drunk Americans in attendance (They had whiskey for the toasts! What were we to do? We were overwhelmed!)

Continue reading Wordless Wedding: Lauren & Aidan

Posted in: Tradition, Wedding Graduates, Wordless Weddings | 21 Comments »

May 2012

Reclaiming Wife: Big Risks for Big Rewards

So it turns out, when we asked you for moving posts last week, there was more this community had to say on the topic than we could possibly imagine. Which makes sense. At this point in most of our lives, we're in a state of transition, of moving forward. Possibly literally and certainly metaphysically, we're all in a state of moving. Which isn't to say this week is about packing boxes. It's not. It's about going the distance in a whole variety of ways. So today is in two parts. First, we have a Reclaiming Wife post from Lauren McGlynn (with her adorable Texas courthouse wedding photos) about uprooting her life and her business and moving to Scotland to be with her husband. Then, this afternoon we have Lauren's amazing Scottish wedding. So let's dive in. This one has huge lessons for all of us.

The year that Aidan & I got married was one of the craziest years of my life. A timeline of that year goes something like this:

Me: B&B cook and aspiring wedding photographer. Him: Philosophy PhD candidate.

January: Aidan and I are engaged!

February: I photograph my first wedding and I love it.

March: People start booking me to photograph their weddings in the fall. I am thrilled.

April: Aidan and I get married in Texas.

May: Aidan and I get married in Scotland.

June: Aidan stays in Scotland while I move to North Carolina to live on my friend’s blueberry farm in the hopes of picking up some weddings so that we can have some money. I can’t legally work in Scotland and he can’t legally work in the States during the summers.

July: Aidan and I talk on the computer a lot. I photograph more weddings in North Carolina.

August: After two months, neither of us can stand being apart anymore, so Aidan flies to the farm, decides that he can not stand the heat, nor the insects, nor the lack of air conditioning (he is a delicate Scottish flower after all), so we drive back to Texas where it is hotter but there is AC.

September-October: I photograph lots of weddings.

November: I am laid off from my job. My new husband, still living on mere grad student salary, tells me not to look for another job, that I better make this photography thing work. Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, I marvel over my good fortune at marrying such a person. I dump more money than I have ever spent on anything into advertising.

December: I start booking weddings like a crazy person.

January: Aidan is offered a Philosophy post doc… in Scotland.

Did you hear that? That record scratch? Is your neck tingling in sympathetic whiplash? Because what’s happening here is that both of our dreams are coming true—ON SEPARATE CONTINENTS.

When I met Aidan he was still a PhD student, and I had recently dropped out of grad school to work at a grocery store. I usually like to dress that up a little to make it sound more respectable by adding that it was a small neighborhood grocery store and that they sold lots of organic cereal and stuff. But whatever: When I met Aidan I was making seven dollars and hour working a mindless job at a lame grocery store. When Aidan finally came through my line, the first thing I did was add "Scottish accent" to the top of my list of sexy man things. After a few months of getting to know each other over brief one-to-three minute checkout line interactions we went out on a date.

A few months later we had a conversation where I asked him how serious he was feeling about our relationship. He made some very serious noises, but then he told me that the future of our relationship depended on me being willing to move wherever he got a job. That might be Canada, that might be the UK, that might be the middle of nowhere Alabama. At the time my career had progressed from grocery store clerk to chopping down trees with a chainsaw then dragging them through a chigger infested desert field as an Americorps volunteer, so I was like: Yeah sure, sounds good to me. Continue reading Reclaiming Wife: Big Risks for Big Rewards

Posted in: Reclaiming Wife | 64 Comments »

Apr 2012

Wedding Graduates: Jenifer & Rob

First, it's hard to resist making a comment about how completely adorable Jenifer and Rob are, and how they just steal your heart in an instant. And goodness knows I have a soft spot for the struggle (and triumphs) of international weddings, with visa problems, and multiple ceremonies, and families meeting for the first time. But what I find most compelling about Jenifer's post is the way she talks about the evolving process of becoming a wife. Because however we get there (I had a transformative wedding day moment, but even still) it's a long and evolving road. So here is Jenifer, three years into marriage, sharing her story.

My husband, Rob, and I were married in Devon, England in the summer of 2009. Rob is English and I am American, which lead to wedding planning that involved quite a bit more planning and preparation due to international constraints. And, no, I don’t mean that it was a pain to have my mom ship me shepherds hooks because they are impossible to find in England. I am talking about the legal side of getting married.

We were actually married March 21, 2008. I couldn’t obtain my British visa without being his wife. We looked down all the other avenues (student visa, fiancée visa) and none of them would work. So, three months engaged, with a venue booked for August 2009, we got married in the Spokane County Courthouse. I have seen many of you post fabulous courthouse weddings, but it wasn’t what I wanted and it was hard. My family wasn’t there. We didn’t tell people for quite awhile because we weren’t sure how to handle it. I knew I wanted to be married to Rob and he wanted to be married to me, but having to do it this way just to be a legal immigrant was hard. For one, I didn’t know how I wanted to behave after this signing of the paperwork. Was I going to act as if Rob was my husband at this point, or would I wait until the ceremony the following year?

As neither of us really knew what we were comfortable with, we grew into it. Slowly over time, we started referring to each other has husband and wife. I was already Mrs. Hislastname due to the legal stuff and introducing myself that way also made me feel that, though our wedding was months away, we were already married. I can’t pinpoint when he stopped being my fiancé and started being my husband. And though I am comfortable with this now and feel that it is a reflection of who we are as a couple, at the time it was odd. Continue reading Wedding Graduates: Jenifer & Rob

Posted in: The Day Itself, Wedding Graduates | 35 Comments »

Apr 2012

Elisabeth: Going The (Intercultural, International, Wedding Planning) Distance

Today I'm thrilled to give you a post from intern Elisabeth, who's writing for us once a month about her wedding planning process. Elisabeth converted to Islam just about a year ago, and she is currently in Saudi Arabia, with her fiancé in London, planning a wedding in Dubai. (And you thought your wedding planning was complicated!) But everyone on staff laughed till they cried over this post, because RIGHT? YES. We've all totally been there. I mean, just look at these annoyed Skype faces. I rest my case.

When Amin and I got engaged last November, I didn’t give a second thought to how long distance would affect our wedding planning. After all, we were world champion long distancers. If we could handle ten years in different places, surely wedding planning over a distance would be a walk in the park, right?

Wrong.

Let me be the first tell you: long-distance intercultural wedding planning is a special, special flower. A puce-colored flower, covered in thorns and smelling of poop. One that steals all your money, runs to the shops and buys a diamond-encrusted baseball bat with which to beat you over the head.

Thinking back, the situation with my engagement ring really should have tipped me off.

Early on, I told Amin that I had actually been given my grandmother’s engagement ring when she passed away. This is something of a tradition in my family—my mother wears her grandmother’s wedding ring, and plans to pass it along to her eldest granddaughter when the time comes. So we identified the ring, and that should have made things simpler.

Enter long distance. The ring was in the US, in my parents’ house, and Amin and I were in London. A year ago, Christmas-time, he called my sisters and tried to enlist them in getting the ring without letting me know. They didn’t know where it was. My mother didn’t know where it was. Time passes. Eventually he has to ask me for help, so I called my mother and walked her through the house to find it. Then we knew where the ring was, but it was nowhere near to me, or to Amin.

Lo, the many months passed, and eventually the stars aligned, and I finally got my hands on the ring. I brought it back to London, and handed it to Amin. Family visits ensued, and the ring burned a hole in his mattress during months when we enjoyed almost no time alone together. Finally, last November, three days before I was flying out of the country, the time was (finally) right. He put that lovely ring on my finger, but then took it right back off… the alterations still needed to be completed. My grandmother wore that ring every day of her more than forty years of marriage and, though it broke my heart to change it at all, it was wearing pretty thin in places by the time it came to me. So when I took off for Saudi Arabia, I left the ring in London. Last week, nearly two full years after we first discussed the subject and four months after getting engaged officially, everything is finally arranged, geographically and otherwise, and the ring has found its final place on my happy little finger.

This ring was meant to make life easier, cheaper and more meaningful for everybody, and instead sucked up almost two full years of time and energy on three different continents.

I’ve dedicated quite a lot of thought over the past months to what, exactly, makes the wedding-planning process so excruciating. With the help of Meg’s book and its wisdom, I have narrowed it down to two major factors. Continue reading Elisabeth: Going The (Intercultural, International, Wedding Planning) Distance

Posted in: Planning: Journeys, The Hard Stuff, Wedding Undergraduates | 57 Comments »

Posts Tagged ‘International Wedding’

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