A LETTER FROM A SWEET COUPLE THAT NEEDED SOME EXTRA HELP WHEN PLANNING THEIR WEDDING ON THEIR OWN..
Hello Yana!
I promised you a longer story of our wedding, here it is!
You might have worried we have fallen off the planet after the wedding, but everything is ok, very ok, we are married and are looking back on a wonderful truly amazing day.
Before I tell a bit more about it let me say thank you very much for your support in the entire process, also on behalf of my wife You have been advising, helping with connections to partners, and have felt for us someone who we can fall back on in case we run into problems or feel uncertain. Thank you very much for that! For example in the case of the program. You will not believe how much time we spent on making the detailed program (did we tell you we both work for a planning software company? Planning is our profession..). Your tips were really good, especially on the folklore group.
There were other typical Bulgarian elements in there as well, the live horo lesson by Valentina, one of our witnesses who is also a zumba instructor. She managed to practically get everyone on the dancefloor! (which is an achievement considering the Dutch guests present, we Dutch are known for many things, but dancing is not one of them). We also did the breaking of the bread (guess who held the biggest piece), and the pitka with salt and honey ceremony. As well as the tasting of the wine by the witnesses committee (gorchivo! ).
The weather on the day was fantastic, the forecast for August 3 was rain and thunder, with clear blue (and warm) days before and after that. When we discussed this with Pastor George from the church in Varna, he half jokingly said he would talk to his Boss (...), and suggested we do the same. He did, we did, and in the end the weather was the best we could imagine. Not too hot, with a bit of clouds protecting our guests from the direct sun during the first ceremony. Then just after the pastor had started his ceremony a strong wind came, almost blowing Diyana's veil off the cliffs, chasing the clouds away so breaking open the whole place and at the same time offering some coolness our guests. A truly special moment. The lesson here: have faith!
We learned a number of lessons:
- Having an overview of all topics with all todos in there and keeping that up to date really helps in maintaining peace of mind. We used an excel file with many tab pages.
- People of which you would be sure to attend did not attend, others of which you were not so sure right from the start confirmed and were there celebrating with us. I guess you just never know. And that is fine. We were surprised
- The photographer and videographer will take more time than planned. We weren't too strict on it, and I believe we will have the most amazing wedding photos (still waiting for them), it did mess up the program a bit. As said, we are still waiting for the results, but I can already say it was really a pleasure to work with Yana Peneva and her boyfriend Alexander.
- Call in the experts! We had you advising us, we listened well to others who got married or attended weddings and we were lucky enough to visit a couple of weddings ourselves before our own. From all of that we took the good things, the things we liked, and also learned what does not work, e.g. we decided to have one language as the main language (English) and only translate some elements into Bulgarian, and none into Dutch. That was a good decision as it kept the pace during the wedding. We were still short in time in the end! Which was good, everyone said it was such a great evening with such a great program. And that's what it is all about. A friend of mine didn't get to read out his speech, he just read it to me the next morning over breakfast.
- That is another lesson: organize something the day before and the day after for the guests. The day after we got together at the beach and in the botanical gardens in Balchik, and then gathered at the restaurant down the botanical gardens (Korona). That worked out well. What worked out less well is that in the end we drove to Cape Kaliakra for the fotoshoot, that obviously took some time, so we left our guests for quite some hours. In hindsight, we would have done the photoshoot a day later, so 2 days after the wedding so we could focus on our guests the whole day after the wedding.
We plan to only get married once, so we are very happy with how it turned out, for other couples this probably good advice.
All the best for now,
Bernd,
with greetings from my lovely wife Diyana