It’s not for all the weddings that I’ve been to that I can say I was really really close from the bride or the groom. For some reason, my best friends don’t get married! When Chris and Bea told us they were getting married at the end of April 2014, I was really excited about celebrating & partying with them. I put their wedding date one year in advance in my calendar, so that nothing in the world could keep me from being there… Nothing except the expected date of delivery of our son, which happened to be April 30!
For you to have an idea, Bea is one of the reasons Marcio and I are together at all; and Chris, he’s the kind of totally unique guy that you know you don’t meet twice in your life. They’ve been living in London for quite a few years now, but have come back for every important moment in my life since then. It’s a shame we couldn’t be there for them on that day, but I am glad I still get to show their photos on the blog! The photos, by the way, were taken by Dragos and Laura of Be Light Photography, that I’ve feature so many times that I’ve lost counts; but as we say, in French, “who loves doesn’t count”.
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The wedding took place in Lewes, in the UK, on April 26, 2014. From the bride:
Chris and I met in Evry, in the outskirts of Paris, in 2004 when I was doing my Erasmus year. I’m Spanish and he’s French AND Portuguese. From the day we met we were good friends, then we fell in love and lived happily in Paris for five years. In 2009 I got transferred to London with my job and a year later he joined me in the English adventure. After 9 years of relationship and with so many places that we can call “home”, the easy decision was to get married, the not so easy was to decide where! We finally went for a wedding in the English countryside, because it was neutral territory, more practical for us in terms of organisation, and, let’s admit it, because I’m a sucker for Jane Austen stories…
Name one thing you regret…
In England most places will only do loud music until midnight, which meant that our dinner had to finish early if we wanted to maximise the dancing time. That put a bit of strain in the scheduling. If we had calculated times from the beginning we would have just had the ceremony one or two hours earlier.
… And one thing that makes you proud.
Three things: First and most important, almost all our guests had to fly to the wedding and we were worried that this would put off many people from coming, but not at all! An overwhelming number of friends and family crossed half Europe for our wedding and we feel blessed for having them during the weekend. Secondly, if you can, hire a wedding planner. You’ll still make all the decisions but they are priceless putting your crazy ideas into practice (like finding that Mini!) and they take care of all the stress so that you can just relax and enjoy. Third, we love quizzes so we prepared a Quiz game about us and the guests, for people to play during the meal if they wanted. We had much fun preparing it, it was a hit and a great icebreaker and played a big part in the overall good mood of the wedding.
