Melanie and Hunter's Wedding in Paris

These photos are from Melanie's wedding on Saturday the 15th. She was an amazingly beautiful bride, and since we only brought our point and shoot to the ceremony, the pictures don't really do her justice. The image of the 5 of us (with Silvie, another bridesmaid and good friend from when she was a kid in NY) is at a restaurant a few days before the wedding. The rehearsal dinner was at an amazing restaurant along the Seine, La Peruse, and I was able to say a nice little speech there after dinner. This ended up being fortuitous, because the day of the wedding I developed laryngitides! I blame Paris's freezing rainy weather the week previous to the ceremony. I now have a French pharmacy in my purse for my sore throat, cough, and cold. But I rally on! Anyways, the day of the ceremony itself the weather was gorgeous before the ceremony and started to rain after. Please click on the images to see them non-pixelated, we are having blog formatting issues, and cannot really deal with them overseas.



The ceremony was in the oldest cathedral in Paris, completed in 1100 (take that Notre Dame!), and in some of the photos we will post later you will see Notre Dame in the background. After the ceremony Melanie and Hunter, their parents, the photographer and Silvie and I took a limo to a few different famous sites to take wedding photos. Silvie and I went to help carry and arrange the veil and train and keep them out of the mud- Melanie referred to us as the "fluffers". Enough said. You can see in the photo how fluffy her dress is- We did well. By the time we were headed to the boat that we were having the reception on, Melanie had been in the dress about 5 hours and REALLY needed to pee. It also started raining really hard, which didn't help. At one point in the limo Mel looked at me and said "have you seen the movie 27 dresses? where the bride needs someone to help her in the bathroom because she can't lift her dress?" I hadn't seen the movie, but I said I certainly didn't mind. Once we were on the boat, she really was about to lose it and we raced for the bathroom- only to find it was a boat bathroom the size of an airplane loo. I looked at Mel and said "you sure you need my help?" and she said yes, so in we went. We made it work, and were both laughing hysterically (the dress was huge- Melanie said it counted as at least 3 more people) because it was like squeezing into a clown car. I can only imagine what the captain must have been thinking. The last photo is me and Isaac on the boat at dinner.



He looked cute in his suit as you can see! We made really good friends with all of Melanie's other bridesmaids and their guys, so that was a really nice aspect. At one point Silvie remarked that all of Melanie's friends are just alike. Isaac got along so well with the 2 bridesmaids' boyfriends/husbands that were there (and at one point discovered one of them knows a "secret" hand puppet thing he made up when he was a kid- the other guy had made it up when he was a kid too) that one bridesmaid, Christina, said "not only does Melanie have a "type" of friend, but we are all dating the same guy!"

The day after the wedding we relaxed and went to a huge flea market, where we wanted everything but showed restraint (thank you, lowly American dollar$) and bought only one etching from the 1800's for 30 Euros. It has a bunch of hydras on it- might be the evolution of hydras? At least it's mythical snakes with several heads. Pierre will have to read us the French on it when we get home. We were supposed to catch the 7:45AM train to Venice on Monday, but when we got to the station they said all the trains were booked until 7pm! Suckage. We put our bags in lockup and strolled around a very cold Paris until the train left. And, while I'm glad we tried a sleeper train, it was not comfortable at all. I don't want to do it ever again! 12 hours later, we were in Venice.

--Kerry