The Joy that is Vimeo

My sister in law just sent me through a link to this amazing wedding video.  I am not a fan of wedding videos in general but this one is an exception.  

Please follow this link and watch it.  It is great! Marina + Andy's Wedding in Stop-Motion | Melbourne, Australia / NYC

NY

Diary of a Greek Bride: The Wedding Part 3

After the photographs, we made our way back to the reception venue where it was time for our grand entrance. Only 2 people knew the song we were coming in to - Johnny our good friend and MC for the day and my sister Nina who was to give Johnny the thumbs up for when we arrived! So we came in to 'Feeling Good' - now I love the Nina Simone version but we decided to use the Muse version and I'm so glad we did. It was a big statement song with a great rock sound to it and worked perfectly! Mr and Mrs Harley were indeed feeling good!

We had informal platters of food served at each table - barbecued fish, meat and chicken with Greek salad, roast oregano potatoes and a whole lot more. There was so much food we ended up serving the left overs the following day for lunch! 

The time whizzed by and we made sure we took a moment to take in everything. One of my most memorable moments of the day was sitting on our table next to Glenn and looking at everyone enjoying the food against the stunning backdrop and just thinking " Wow, this is just how I imaged it to be!" Magda and Markos had done a brilliant job of decorating the place with twinkly little lights, lanterns and beautiful white roses everywhere… it was the romantic, soft elegance we were hoping to achieve. Our photographer got some brilliant shots of the reflections of the lights in the pool - very artistic!

We finally got around to doing the speeches - my best friend Win began was first up and she generally gushed about the two of us, having known both of us before we got together and so many lovely things about each of us. It was an honour to have her make the first speech. More traditionally we had father of the bride, father of the groom, best man then it was my turn. I had decided to make a speech - after all, when do we ever get to hear from the bride? I had put a lot of thought into what I wanted to say and tried to say something personal about each of my bridesmaids/brides man and what their friendship meant to me. I then went on to thank each set of parents before declaring my undying love for my beloved new husband! I was a bag of nerves to begin with and after fluffing my first few sentences I found my pace and managed to get to the end without breaking down or dropping the mic.

Just as Glenn was about to start his speech we got a bit of a surprise… fireworks! It was rather an untimely surprise as Glenn had began said a few words before they started going off and quite literally stole the show! We later found out that my mum had arranged for this to happen at the end of the speeches, however, because we were behind time so to speak, the man setting them off was going to miss the last ferry back to Paros, so he needed to get them lit so he could scarper! What a hard act to follow! Glenn's speech was lovely though - it short and sweet and really heartfelt.

Now we hadn't planned to have a first dance as such. What was supposed to happen after the speeches, as discussed and agreed with our wedding planner was this: we were going to ask everyone to gather round as we cut the cake, then we'd walk over to the dance floor as though we were going to have a first dance but in actual fact we were going to get everyone to join in and dance to Zorbas dance! Sadly this did not happen. The speeches finished, there was no cake in sight and the DJ had disappeared. Of course nobody else noticed this except us… so we carried on mingling with guests while giving each other puzzled looks as to why there was no cake, no Greek dancing, no wedding planner and no music. After about 5 mins the DJ emerged from wherever he'd been (Scoffing food? Sleeping? Toilet?) and decided to put on The Proclaimers "500 miles" - a song from the 80s by a Scottish band. We weren't impressed! Anyway, regardless of this we headed over to the dance floor and started to boogie to the Ting Tings 'Shut Up and Let Me Go' and after a few minutes everyone had made a huge ring around us thinking this was our "first dance"!! Well… we couldn't have chosen a more inappropriate song title to dance our first dance to as a newly married couple! At least we can laugh about it now….

To be fair to him, the DJ was brilliant, he played most of our playlist and threw a few of his own tracks in there and everyone seemed to have a good old boogie. There was impromptu drunken swimming in the pool (in pants!) and my only complaint was he didn't have Beyonce's "All the single ladies" for me to throw my bouquet to…. But then I hadn't told him I was going to do this. So I'll let him off!

Out of nowhere, Magda came and grabbed us from the dance floor and insisted we cut the cake - oh really….? Like she'd just remembered! It was a pretty lame cake-cutting to be honest. Most people were either drunk or on the dance floor by now (or both) and didn't realise we were cutting the cake… so we had about 6 people watch us 'cut the cake'. By this time our photographer had left as she had to go at midnight and it was probably 1am by now now…so although disappointing, at least we still managed to do it. Most people had filled up on delicious desert by then and couldn't stomach wedding cake anyway… it remained untouched the whole night which was kind of sad.

Despite the few hiccups I've spoken about, it really was a great night and nobody else noticed these things or if they did, they were kind enough not to say anything. I'm only writing about it to really drive home the fact that things will not go to plan on your wedding day! No matter how much planning and preparation you do, sometimes it's just not enough but things will have a way of working out. You rely on other people so much on your wedding it's no wonder the term Bridezilla gets banded about so much - you are literally putting your whole wedding in other people's hands and sometimes, it's understandable and perfectly normal to get upset when something goes wrong. Perhaps we should have been a bit more Bridezilla and less laid back, but it's just not our style!

All images by Magdalene Kourti

That said, we really did have the most truly amazing, unique, memorable wedding day. It wasn't just the best day of our lives, it was the best WEEK of our lives!

CC

Anniversary Photo Shoot

Hi All, Sara here, today I want to talk to you about engagement & other photo shoots! Now I have to tell you, I am not a great fan of stylised photo shoots, I completely understand wanting to hire a professional photographer to take some decent images of your engagement, and I love discreet pictures of a surprise proposal, but that is because they capture REAL emotion, not staged, made up and hair dressed to perfection!

Despite my above position of photo shoots, I think if you're going to do it, then do it well, and this photo shoot really managed that! Cool concept, great couple, cute photos!!!

Images from Green Wedding Shoes, photographer Simply Rosie Photography