Summer in Rome — hot and dusty, with fashionable people in linen, cobblestones, a bright blue sky, orange roofs, wooden shutters, and full of bustle until siesta, when everyone gets out from under the sun and chows down. On mozzarella di bufala, crusty fresh baked bread, local floral-tasting olive oil, cold Frascati wine, sparkling water, gelato, etc., etc. I lived in Rome for half a year ten years ago, and it is just heavenly. Or some people might think it’s dirty, rundown, disorganised, and in your face. It does involve the prospect of being sandwiched in a non-airconditioned Metro car with some people who do not ascribe to the value of deodorant. And some of the buildings are crumbling a bit. But what place is perfect?

I lived outside of Rome in an area called the Castelli Romani, in which Aeneas supposedly founded Alba Longa. It was much quieter than Rome itself. I lived next to a vineyard and olive grove, close to other similar farms. The lady up the road sold students large quantities of wine that she made by stamping grapes in her bathtub. This wine was known colloquially on campus as “Good year”, not because it was harvested in a good year, but because it tasted faintly of tyres. Oh the things students will drink…. While living there, I studied subjects like ancient drama and art history, visiting Roman amphitheatres and art galleries. I could continue…I have a lot of nostalgia for this place.

Via Truus, Bob & Jan too! on Flickr

I started looking for venues in the Castelli Romani since it is possible to rent out an entire villa there and thus provide both food and accommodation to our guests. Like a hotel wedding but grander, in a historic villa. I found a few nice villas and reception venues, and the town halls themselves for the ceremony were quite grand. I was quite tempted when I saw Albano town hall was quite castle-y and one can have catering in the garden.

Via leosagnotti on Flickr

Additional things this area has going for it: Mary (one of my bridesmaids) and myself both know the area well (in fact we met there for the first time when we realised we both needed roommates for the next year, and that’s how history was made). It’s quite handy to get to from Ciampino airport, reachable by Ryanair, making it cheaper for our guests to attend. And who would argue with Italian food and wine?

Cons: there is no nice beach nearby — there is water but it’s not that nice. Castel Gondolfo, the Pope’s summer residence in the Castelli Romani, has Lake Albano, which is good for swimming, but in the heat of summer, people would rather be at a sandy ocean beach. Also, getting married in/near Rome feels a bit too religious to us, and we’re planning on a civil ceremony.

So many options! Which place will we choose? We need to book a flight soon to finalise venues…but to where? Stay tuned….

via (Erik) on Flickr

Ah Barcelona. Good food, good atmosphere, beautiful architecture.

via SCWebster on Flickr

The first place we looked at was inordinately expensive (Casa Battlo). So we expanded our options beyond amazing buildings made by Gaudi. The second place I wrote was El Poble Espanyol, the Romanesque monastery Sant Miquel. It’s been over a month, and no response.

The third place I wrote was Palau Moxo, a beautiful old property in the middle of Barcelona. They had a room with a piano, chandeliers and all that jazz. It’s been over a month, and after multiple emails, still no response.

I can only assume the Catalan people have something against us getting married in their fine city. That or they’re not willing to correspond in English. Or by email. Still waiting to hear back!

via Ian Britton on Freefoto

Between Nice and Monaco lies the strip of coast which is the next location on our list, a.k.a. the French Riviera.

In Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, most of the action takes place in the fictional town of Beaumont-sur-Mer, which was set in the real town of Beaulieu-sur-Mer. Three good things about this location:

• it’s on a train from Nice that takes ten minutes and costs two euro
• it has decent hotels priced around 60-90 euro, cheap enough for a long weekend
• it has beaches

via Jacqueline Poggi on Flickr

So everything would have been perfect for our guests.

We had one venue we had our heart set on, Villa Kerylos. It is a gorgeous Greek-style villa that is over a century old, with an inner courtyard that would have fit our numbers very well.

Alas, too expensive. More expensive than all other venues we looked at except for the Gaudi house in Barcelona. We even priced out a fancy foodie Lenotre venue nearby, at the Rotonde, and it was similarly well over our budget.

What a let down! So the French Riviera is out, these being the most reasonably priced options we could find.

Via John Himoff on Flickr

Good news everyone! After a bit of searching we’ve managed to secure a venue for an engagement party. And in even better news: you’re invited!

We’ll be at De Hems in Soho on March 2, and hopefully you will be too. We have quite a large area, so feel free to bring along friends and well-wishers too.

Details

Venue:

De Hems, 11 Macclesfield Street, Soho, London, W1D 5BW

Date:

March 2, 2012

Time:

6PM onwards

See you there.

Next on our list of wedding locations is Bruges. This is easily accessible by train from

Via Setaou_ on Flickr

Brussels, which is accessible by train from London. Rory and I went to Bruges on his most recent surprise birthday trip, and had a fabulous time using plenty of colourful language to describe Bruges, a la Colin Farrell. We climbed the Belfry, did the Segway tour, and drank lots of fruit beer. We did not see any little people.

I had some ideas already around what we might do in Bruges, other than reenact the film:

Via Degilbo on Flickr

• Belgian chocolate seashells bought in bulk and repackaged in small bags as favours
• Cursing on the invitations
• Segway tour for all our guests
• Lots of fruit beer, and Belgian beer such as Kwak, for all our guests

By the end of looking for venues, I was considering doing the safety dance.

For venues, I started with restaurants, and found one that could accommodate the whole party of 70. But they could not allow us to dance there, because it was a listed building. So we could eat in separate rooms of the building, and then go to a local club afterwards, to a non-exclusive party.

Via Esteban Manchado on Flickr

I also found a gorgeous venue inside the Belfry, the Dali gallery, with dramatic lighting. I was really excited to hear back from this venue, and the price was reasonable. But — they could not allow us to dance there, because of the artwork and the building. Perhaps we could go to a club.

Via zcamerino on Flickr

Disheartened, I wrote all the hotels that are known for having event space for weddings in Bruges. There are three. Two were too small for us. The one that got back to us with a quote today is beautiful and grandiose, and a bit pricey. I have no doubt it would be an excellent wedding venue for us, so it is there as an option for when we evaluate our options. And we can dance if we want to.

via Ivan C on Flickr

Vienna is the first destination we are looking at, so here is a little feature.

Rory and I went to Vienna for a weekend in February 2010 to celebrate me having landed a job in London (before this is a whole other story of visas, living in separate countries for months, and some free consulting work which was supposed to turn into a job). We had just watched The Third Man (the theme tune of which was my new ringtone), and could not wait to go on the big wheel.

Via Elizabeth J on Viator

It was ridiculously cold, enough so that Rory finally broke down and bought a scarf, something he had never done before. We ducked in and out of fancy cafes to stay warm. The cafes are all done up with marble and pillars, decorated ceilings, and the waiters wear tails and bow-ties and serve you your coffee on a silver platter. Never mind that the coffee itself is not to the Italian standard; it’s a different kind of coffee, altogether (it’s a different kind of coffee). We visited the Schönbrunn Palace of Sissi and the fancy art museums. The cuisine was lovely, and we got to enjoy some Grüner Veltliner with it, which is a citrusy local white. Rory even successfully ordered dessert for us auf Deutsch. They are über-generous with the Schlag (whipped cream), and everything sweet we ate was covered in it. *drool*

Via Lachlan Hardy on Flickr

Despite Rory having described Vienna as the coldest place on earth, it gets an average of 13 rainy days in June and has an average temperature between 17 and 25 C. This was better than our options in Germany and Eastern Europe and on par with the Mediterranean for temperature.  Another advantage of Vienna is that my German is near-fluent and we would not need a local planner because I could speak directly to suppliers, or a translator to jump through the hoops to civilly marry there. On the spectrum of how difficult they make it for non-residents to marry, Vienna is in the middle of the spectrum, between Italy and France/Belgium. Italy you basically show up in the country with a few documents, stop by your embassy to get more documents and deliver them to the local place you’re getting hitched. France you have to establish a 40 day residency, at which point you can apply to get married. So as much as we might fancy a French wedding, we would have to do the legal stuff in the UK. Austria is a little more complicated than Italy, but not much.

Via Wikipedia

Let’s talk venues. Vienna is a dream to plan from abroad — 80% of the venues I look at have venue hire quotes or package pricing already up on the webpages. I don’t have to ask for quotes, and wait, and forget who I’m still waiting for. A few places make me ask for quotes, like Hotel Sacher, or the Vienna Zoo (oldest zoo in the world). But palaces like Schönbrunn and Auersperg are totally transparent about venue hire costs. I’m looking at a vineyard owned by the city of Vienna for an outdoor ceremony (they have a wine cellar for inclement weather) or the Kursalon, which is inside the city park and includes a free pianist in the venue hire. Ragtime, anybody?

And for the finale, we could all go on the big wheel!

Via Wikipedia

Excitingly we have narrowed down our wedding locations even further. How to do this, you may ask, with so many interesting and eclectic locations to choose from. The answer is weather. I happen to really, really dislike being rained on, especially if I’m going to get all gussied up (the phrase “bedraggled bride” comes to mind).

I found this nifty site on which you can find historical climate averages by month — that’s number of rainy days, amount of rain, and temperature highs and lows. I went through our city list, collected all the data, and eliminated all of Germany, Amsterdam (20 days of rain in June!), and anywhere else that had excessive rain.

Our list of possible destinations, other than Dublin, is now:

• Vienna
• Barcelona
• Nice (French Riviera)
• Bruges, and
• Rome (Castelli Romani).

All of these have less than a 50% chance of rain, and are warm (except for Bruges, which could be mild instead of warm).

Dublin, with 26 days of rain on average in June (are you kidding me? and I’m actually considering living there again at some point in the future?), is still under consideration because it is the place which would involve the fewest number of people flying.

I will do a little feature on each of these locations and the venues we are exploring this month so that the next freshly engaged couple who stumbles across this on the internet won’t have to duplicate work and will have some ideas of nice places for a medium size wedding (and so the rest of youse can revel in the possibilities with us).

I’m quite focussed on making sure this wedding hits the right level of geekiness. We don’t want to scare away or confuse the non-geeky (mainly family) guests by going too far. I think getting people to all show up in steampunk attire would take a lot of explaining and even more cajoling. But we are both geeks in our own ways, so it would be a shame to leave that part of ourselves out of the ceremony and reception.

One obvious and easy thing to play with is the cake. There’s a lot that a creative person can do with frosting, as you can see from this collection of awesome and geeky cakes. The H R Giger one looks particularly delicious.

While I was never a big Mario fan (I had a Sega Megadrive when all the cool kids had a SNES), the Mario cakes do have one thing going for them that make them particularly appropriate for us. Back when Eileen and I had met but not yet become romantically entangled I made 1-up cupcakes and shared pictures of them on Facebook. Eileen liked the look of them so much that we’ve made them together several times since then.

I started requesting quotes for venue hire this week — the first one just came back at 20,000 euro! Now to be fair, it was for a floor of a house built by Gaudi in Barcelona, but for that price, I would want to be purchasing the house with a downpayment, not renting it for a night.

The only countries I have looked at so far where venues are transparent about venue hire costs are Germany and Austria (I love how straightforward they are). I am perplexed as to why most venues are so opaque about their pricing. If venues would ballpark their hire costs, it would make it far easier to know whether to bother contacting them. If you think about it, they are creating work for themselves by attracting many quote requests from people who are never going to contact them again.

I’m avoiding destination wedding websites in my search. Why? Because the ones I have looked at so far are useless. They have lovely photos, are promoting a few venues, and have no costs listed. There are local planners, which we may end up using onsite on the day as event managers for a lower cost but not to plan the whole wedding, and they also show pictures or promote a few venues, and do not list costs. For destination wedding advice and more, I am afraid to look at bridal magazines because they will tell me I need loads of things that I have no intention of including. I have not been planning this day my whole life, and not everything that the wedding industry thinks is important, is important to us. We are trying to keep the costs down on the unimportant things. For example, we agreed today we would make the stationery ourselves with supplies from our local craft shop, because it’s far more personalised and a third of the price of professional stationery. So our guests can look forward to some fabulous handmade greetings.

I created a checklist, draft budget, and schedule for planning. This month we will make our shortlist, review the budget and put together a savings plan, set up a registry, and arrange at least one engagement party so we can celebrate.

Oh how I love planning! Updates on everything to come soon.

We’re engaged!

I’m so happy — not just for the wedding, but also for a new project to run.

Don’t worry, I haven’t got to the Gantt charts yet; we’re really more at the scoping stage.

So here’s how to figure out where to have a destination wedding and to pick a venue:

Step 1: list everyone we know in a spreadsheet, along with number of people from each unit attending, and likelihood of attendance if the wedding is in Dublin (where 1/3 of our guests live) versus other places in Europe that could be more complicated to reach. Rank likelihood on a three point scale, using “=SUMIF” and multiplying most likely’s by 100%, maybe’s by 67%, and possibly’s by 33%, then summing for a total. This gives us approximately 100 guests if in Dublin, and approximately 60 guests if in “Europe”. Now we can look at venues, preferably looking at ones which can take up to 120 in Dublin and up to 80 in “Europe” in case more people take up our invitations than projected.

Step 2: narrow down “Europe” to something more manageable. Look up Dublin airport in Wikipedia and create another spreadsheet with destinations of airlines people actually use (mainly AerLingus and Ryanair). Remove any places we agree should be out of the running (goodbye, Alicante), then look at base flight costs to eliminate the most expensive destinations to reach (there goes Malta). Next, input average lows and highs for June, average rainfall and average number of rainy days, and remove negative outliers. Munich is out; with 11 cm of rain (4.3 inches) on average for June, we do not want to be caught in a downpour. We are now down to 12 “destinations” other than Dublin and can look at venues in each.

Our list is now down to the following: Vienna, Bruges (Brussels), Prague, Provence (Nice), Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Lake Como (Milan), Frascati (Rome), Cinqueterre (Pisa), Amsterdam, Barcelona, Geneva, and Dublin. From this we will make a shortlist after investigating venues, transportation, hotels, and costs. And when we whittle it down far enough, we will plan to visit this year and pick our venue. How exciting!