The wedding was really fun. The weather was perfect, the bride and groom were lovely and radiant, and we suffered not at all from our halting German - though as always, I decided that I will try and improve it, I really will…

German weddings are not that different from Swedish ones, except that the church wedding is not sufficient on its own - the legally binding ceremony is civil, and can take place before or after the church wedding (which is not obligatory). In Sweden, couples can choose a civil or a religious wedding, but if they go for the religious version they don’t need a civil one as well. Anyway, in this case the happy couple had been legally wed for a month already, not that that detracted any from the ceremony in the church! I admit that I did not quite understand all of the priest’s speech, but to sing hymns in German felt quite natural.

The wedding cake was magnificent and very yummy - and quite rich. Fortunately, we got a few hours to get hungry again, before the dinner which was excellent. I don’t think I’d had Sauerkraut before, it’s definitely a taste I would have remembered. I wonder where I can get it in Sweden.

According to a couple of the other guests, and the bride, many German weddings include a lot of games for the guests. (Well, so do Swedish weddings, come to think of it.) This one didn’t, which gave us lots of time to talk to the other people, those we knew and those we didn’t. The entertainment was splendid, too.

Our pictures are here. (There will be more of them soon, I believe - I managed to hide some of the best photos so Johan couldn’t upload them to flickr.)

We spent last weekend in Helsinki, celebrating the wedding of Eemeli and Saijaa, two friends of ours from the Finnish science fiction fandom. Wedding parties are always fun; this one included the opportunity to come up with names for the twins who are expected in May, as well as the Finnish tradition (which I didn’t know before) of the bride being abducted and the groom having to perform and do various tricks until he has collected enough money from the wedding guests to buy his new wife back. (Eemeli can juggle pretty well, even with eggs. He cannot sing, however.)

One of the best parts was the performance by three of the four members of the folk music group Inehmo. They sang six or seven songs during the evening, and wow, are they ever good! Their site is mostly in Finnish, but the link “Ohjelmisto” leads to a page with a few sound clips. Here is a YouTube video of them, again only a short clip of about 30 seconds. I really like Finnish folk music, and I like that type of singing, strong voices without much vibrato. If I understood Tero correctly, one of the members of the group is an old friend of Eemeli’s mother, which is why they were hired for the evening. Their first CD (I assume — the site says “recording”) will be out in April. I think I’ll try to get hold of that.