At the start of the month, I boarded a plane and after 20 hours, 3 flights, 100 inflight films, wriggling in my seat because I needed to pee but the Korean man next to me was asleep and a Japanese security guard rifling through my knickers because he thought I was a drug dealer…I arrived at Sapporro airport for my best friends wedding.
I guess the main theme of the week was joy. Joy in the company that we kept, joy in the food that was cooked for us and joy in the celebration of Ochan and Peta’s wedding. We, a collection of Peta’s closest, stayed in a guest house owned by the couple. We ate typical japanese food with chop sticks, slept in little man made castle shaped pods, walked the streets of sapporro and visited a chocolate factory that doesn’t make chocolate. For those of you who have visited Japan before, you will understand its truly wonderful but utterly bizarre ways. Heated toilet seats were a constant surprise to me. The constant assault on the senses as you walk down any high street in the city. It was not my first time visiting but we found ourselves saying many times about how different normality in Japan is from our own normalities.
So.. the wedding. Well Peta and Ochan decided to do things a little differently than what would be considered to be the norm in Japan. In Japan, couples book a venue and then that venue dictates which suppliers they use for all of the other elements of the wedding…the dress, the photographer, the cake etc. In Japan, guests are also asked to pay to attend the wedding but this is something that they didn’t wish to do. They found a BBQ house in the mountains, which couldn’t be further from a wedding ready venue if it tried. They decided that not only would they give the inside of the BBQ house a face lift, but they would also built a huge tent on the side of the venue. They have around 200 guests and so they needed to have a lot of under cover space incase the weather took a turn for the worst. We then hit the shops, purchasing all of the bits and bobs that we could find that we felt would match with the boho theme of the wedding. We visited a flower market and bought armfuls of flowers, we scrubbed, swept and tried desperately not to need to use the really nasty toilet. It was like no other experience i’ve had in my life.
Here are a selection of photos from the trip. I was a bridesmaid on the day but obviously couldn’t remember resist taking some snaps of my own. I had the best time. Peta, I love you x