Taming the control freak

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As my regular readers well know, I fluctuate between being totally enamoured with Germany’s relaxed nature of wedding planning and being totally head exploding frustrated. But the fact remains: our wedding is taking place here and all of our vendors have this same mentality.

This isn’t really a bad thing – it basically means:

• no contracts (that’s right people, the only contracts we have are with our photographer and our officiant)

• no down payments (only with the above mentioned two) (not even on our venue!!)

• a whole lot of “we’ll discuss that the day before” or “let us put something together for you”
For example, our dessert buffet is going to be a…surprise! Well, we did demand Kaiserschmarrn, but other than that, I trust our venue to put together a lovely spread.

Our prosecco toast is going to be another “surprise” – we will be having “prosecco, juices, various appetizers and TBD punches”.

Our band is being the most difficult to pin down – they told us we can discuss our dance options THE NIGHT BEFORE. This freaked me out, quite a bit, so I harassed them until they finally caved and suggested a few waltzes that they usually play. But they won’t give more. So our music: SURPRISE!!

I mean, this is actually all kind of nice, from a relaxed person’s standpoint. And from a price standpoint: we are paying flat fees for all of this, so as long as the variety is nice then we don’t have to agonize over spending an extra XX€ to have a particular juice selection, etc. But it is a bit stressful for someone who would like to have the whole thing a bit spelled out.

My solutions?

• focus on the things I can control, like DIYing my decorations, choosing our outfits, writing our ceremony music, making an awesome IPOD playlist for our prosecco toast and hiring our friend to be our DJ after 12:00am just to make sure that we get to hear our favourite songs.

• laugh about it – it’s Germany! They already thing I am nutso for wanting blue flowers on our cake and DIYing 75 chair covers – that’s ok! I think that we are lucky in that our German guests are not expecting “normal” because they know there will be a lot of America style touches going on, and the American guests are expecting a German-style wedding. So a bunch of guests with no solid expectations equals (hopefully!) happy (and intrigued) guests!

• enjoy the element of surprise – I guess it’s kind of nice that I don’t know EXACTLY what will happen on my wedding day. This is almost always the case in most German weddings, since often friends and family plan various elements of the wedding (games, guest book etc) to pop up as suprises along the way. I am embracing this lovely element of the day and taking lots of DEEP breaths.
Mostly, I am remembering that in the end, the day is about the DAY and not about all those details – it’s going to be a lot of fun :)

Oy Oy Oy

Actually, this isn’t a frustrated post, as the title would tend to suggest – it’s a happy yummy sugary one!

This is the post about us ordering our cake!! Why “Oy Oy Oy”? Well.. that just so happens to be the name of the town where we purchased said cake!

The location of our wedding is in Mr. Schnitzel’s “hometown” (where he grew up after moving from Poland) and it is quite a small town, in the middle of the Alps:

Oy is even smaller. And even higher. And even Alp-ey-er.

Despite its smallness and highness (but perhaps because of its Alp-ey-ness) Oy boasts one of the finest most delicious pastry shops in the entire Allgäu region (this is a personal assessment but I think the Busloads of over-60 tourists that offload there every day for their 3pm coffee and cake break would also support this theory). Additionally, they have their own Coffee Roastery.

Two weeks ago on one of our many planning trips, we drove up (literally) to Oy to give this cake a try. OH (B)OY!

YUM

We were sold. So we went back this past weekend to officially order the cake (we actually had wanted to do this before, but they were too busy with the busloads of tourists).

We decided on a “German-style” cake stand (they don’t really do typical American tiered cakes…):

to hold our FOUR DIFFERENT TYPES OF CAKE. Yes, I know there are a lot of capital letters in this post. But really, I think FOUR DIFFERENT TYPES OF CAKE warrants shouting letters, right?

Here are our layers, starting from the bottom tier:
• “Florentiner” – Buttercream with cherry marbeled throughout

• “Kaffecreme” – Coffee cream cake

• “Rum Truffel” – ‘nuff said

• Hazelnut – this is really nutty maple-ey delicious

Then we moved on to deco. As you know, our colors are blue and green. The Germans think this is really strange. They laugh at us, a lot. Sometimes they even taunt us. (they are used to sparkly red with roses, I guess..).

so when we showed this inspiration photo,

the lady helping us looked up and said “that?”
“Yup”

*then she turned around and called her husband, obviously the chief pastry chef, out to look*
*he squinted his eyes to look at our laptop (probably another reason they thought we were crazy) and said*:

“well.. if that’s what you REALLY WANT then I guess we could do it”

That, folks, is the brutal honesty of the German folk. We nodded vigorous yeses and they consented. Living in Germany sometimes just requires a thick skin and faith in your own decisions. At this point, they asked us if we had a cake topper, or if we needed one.

Hm…err… well yes we have a cake topper

*Mr. Schnitzel and I looked at each other with panicked eyes. OMG we can’t tell them that our cake topper is WallE and Eve, two Pixar robots. They will throw us out of their shop*


“We have one. We will bring it ourselves”

PHEW ok, that was settled. We asked about delivery and they said they could “drive the cake down” and then we asked about paying, and she said “oh, just bring the money when you bring back the cake stand (we agreed to do that).

How much, we asked? Well… hard to say exactly… Could we have a ballpark figure? ok…
*paper and pen calculations*

“85 Euros plus decorations”

*WHAT?! keep a straight face. (We have 375 Euros budgeted for the cake)*
“how much for decorations?”

*waiting for it*
“oh… 20 or 30 euros"

*WHAATTT??*


“and delivery?”

*here it comes…*

“mmm…. 5 euros, maybe, for the gas…”

Whoa. Ok, I take back all my complaints ever about Germany not having a wedding industry trying to sell me things. They literally are just charging us for the cake. No “wedding” fee, no delivery fee… insane. This is the best thing EVER. I’ll even take their insults about our cake decoration choices, any day. Guests: get excited because now we can use that budget for something else delicious (or imbibeable) for the reception!!
Deeelliiisshhhusss cake anyone?

Fighting the crowds

This morning, I did something very German. I waited outside Aldi for it to open and then stormed in and bought things before they sold out. Like a little substitute for lack of Black Friday madness here...

You see, Aldi, which you may be familiar with from the US as being a big discount grocer, originated in Germany. The Albrecht brothers founded it (Aldi is short for Albrecht Discounter), had a big fight and split up their chain, and now there is an Aldi Süd (south) and an Aldi Nord (north) in Germany. Anyways, NOW Aldi sells groceries at cheap prices and random inexpensive products. Twice a week they receive new product shipments, which are published in a little newspaper handout, and the more attractive items sell out almost immediately.

This week they were offering two items that I was interested in: ice skates for Mr. Schnitzel (so that we can skate on even more frozen alpine lakes) AND printable photo paper for our homemade wedding photobooth!

When I arrived, there was a modest crowd.

look at the blobby lack of a line (typical German...)

After about five minutes of waiting, the crowd had swelled to gigantic proportions, and when the doors opened, I was practically carried inside by the masses. I made a beeline for the skates and frantically searched for the correct size - it was really hard, with all the arms and legs snaking over my shoulders, grasping. I finally found it and wiggled out of the chaos. Then I grabbed three packs of photopaper (€4.50 for 150 sheets!) and headed for the cash register. Here are my treasures on the conveyer belt:

reflecting the fluorescent Aldi lighting...

We will be setting up a photo booth using David Cline's photobooth software and my engagement laptop, so we knew we would be needing this paper! I'm happy to have one thing crossed off the list, and to have gotten it so inexpensively.

Did you get up at ungodly hours to buy anything wedding related?

German Wedding Activity – Paint your own portrait

As part of my planning process, I am doing what probably every bride or groom to be does – thinking about aspects of weddings past attended that I especially liked! For me, this also means integrating various American and German wedding traditions. Most of my readers know about American traditions, so I am going to highlight a few neat ideas that the Germans have, that I haven't yet seen racing through the blog-o-sphere. The first one is the idea of a Communal Painting.

I saw this at a friend's wedding, and I thought it was the perfect way to get guests involved and to have something lovely to take home at the end of the night. The idea is to take a blank canvas, sketch a drawing of you as a couple in a light pencil, set out brushes and paints, and let the guests complete the picture! I'll tell you, the result is really stunning! It's probably a good idea to have someone who can draw well to sketch the picture of you, and it is also advisable for that person to sort of "supervise" the painting and add touch-ups every now and then. But then again, as long as you aren't too concerned with getting a "professional" result, let people cut loose! Here's a quick step-by-step how-to.


1) Purchase a blank canvas of a reasonable size (this one was about 36 x 48in)

2)Using a photo as a guide, sketch the two of you onto the canvas. It is best here to only include the faces, and make sure to outline hair, eyes, glasses, etc.

3) Set up the canvas in a corner of your reception hall with a sign reading "Wedding Portrait – help us create a painting of the wedding couple!"

4) Set up brushes, paints, water and paper towels


5) Let your guests paint! If you wish, ask a more artistically-minded friend to man the table and help people or "touch up" mistakes – although this is not necessary

6) Hang the finished product up in your new married home, and cherish the memories of that night and your guests forever!

Let me know if you try this, I'd love to see pictures of other creations!

Registries

So it might be a bit early to be talking about this, but I have been thinking about the registry situation. In Germany, they don't really do registries, at least not really. It's still stuck in the old-fashioned days where you actually have to go to the fancy store and they give you all kinds of advice about what fancy schmancy stuff you should put on your grown up fancy schmancy list and how you need a roasting pan to go with your sauce pan… Part of the problem is, Germany is woefully lacking in wonderful stores like Target, Pottery Barn and Williams Sonoma. Lovely stores for the normal people of the world who like gadgets and household stuff but don't want to spend a million dollars or drive all the way to ikea to buy some plastic bins(ok, I know that Williams Sonoma is actually kinda fancy… but it's also kinda wonderful). I have been browsing the amazingly designed registry sites of those stores and bemoaning Germany's medieval stance on weddings. The other problem is, there are about a million things that I want at Target, Pottery Barn and Williams Sonoma precisely because I CAN'T get them here in Europe: Jalapeno roaster pans and measuring cups and Ziploc bags and stuff like that. But of course, who wants to schlep a Bundt pan across the ocean?

So here's the solution I'm thinking of: we will register at the above mentioned three American places, but only for things that are packable. That way, people who are interested in giving us the joy of lovely American products that we otherwise couldn't get will be able to do that, if they are willing to schlep them in their suitcase. Then, we will go to snooty Kustermann (who has really really nice stuff, but they are still snooty) and having one of those archaic registry meetings and pick stuff like plates and glasses and silverware that people otherwise wouldn't want to pack. And we will probably also use something called the "wish gallery" which is a German website where you can make your wedding registry from a bunch of different online shops who were too lazy to make their own registries, so people can then order directly from those stores (like amazon, karstadt, etc…). That seems like a rather unwieldy solution, but the best of both worlds :)

Not that this thing is about the presents, or anything :) Just a thought in the planning process… (hope this didn't come off as to egotistical and material!!)

How did other expats deal with this? Did anyone follow the German tradition of just asking for money? Does anyone else think that is pretty boring? Hmmm..