The Private Ceremony

The view on the way to our beautiful ceremony 

After the civil registration ended in the Stadthaus, it was time to make our way to Rapperswil, a quaint little town along the east side of Lake Zurich, for our private ceremony. A bus was chartered for the guests while Mirriam's godparents drove us to the venue. Perhaps it was excitement of the wedding day, or the anxiety from having to memorise our wedding prayer, but it was almost 5pm and I had forgotten to have both breakfast and lunch..

Liyana hard at work

We reached the wedding venue in Rapperswil ahead of our guests and I was so hungry that I helped myself to the Apéro first. It was going to be about another two hours before dinner would be served. When the guests finally arrived, Liyana (the maid-of-honour and sole bridesmaid), between the munchies, went around taking Polaroid pictures of our guests which were subsequently used to decorate the guest book. It was also around this time when Mirriam decided, for reasons I was only going to find out later, to scurry in circles around wedding venue. Thinking that it could be the pre-ceremony jitters, I decided that it was probably a good idea to stay close. It would appear that she eventually gave up scampering around the Schloss and we decided to go through again the wedding prayers that we had intended to commit to memory.

Mirriam composing herself

The private ceremony started with Mirriam performing her rendition of Elvis' "Love Me Tender". The song was not part of our agreed programme and so I found out that she had been avoiding me earlier because she had wanted to warm up her vocal cords for the surprise song. As usual, she sang beautifully, despite the fact that I foiled her warm up plans.

The handsome-as-a-movie star groom, sans spectacles!

..but then I couldn't see my prayer, and so the spectacles came back on

When she finally marched over to the front, I was not able to see her too clearly because my own vanity had compelled me to put away my glasses. Unfortunately, it turned out that we weren't able to recall the wedding prayer that we were supposed to have memorised, and I had to put on my glasses anyway as we read from the printout.