Wedding the French way

Wow, it's 11/11/11 today and lots of people said it is an auspicious day. It is public holiday in France so everyone gets to enjoy a long weekend. We certainly had a lovely afternoon, it was sunny and we went to C town for a visit and had picnic close to a river.

I saw on news in Malaysia that lots of couples had booked this day to get married. I'm not sure if French couples also chose this day though since we are in autumn (not a hot season to get married here). Talking about wedding, I want to share two unique things found in French weddings.

French wedding is famous with its marathon style of ceremony + cocktail + dinner + party (last for about 12 hours). But the first thing I want to talk about is the notion of Broom Wagon (voiture balai). It is a car decorated with brooms which originally created to follow the bicycle race and sweeping up those who were unable to finish the race on time. A wedding broom wagon serves the same purpose: picking up cars that are lost on the way from Church / Town Hall to the reception venue.

Most of the time the wagon is prepared by close friends. This photo shows my father admiring the one prepared for our wedding.

We attended a wedding two weekends ago and this time we had the task to decorate a broom wagon. The theme is Fest-noz (Brittany dancing party) so we had the Brittany flag as background. The challenge was more on how to tie the board to the car as it was quite windy that day. We drove at 30km/h on the way to the wedding and we lost 2 balloons on the way. Photo shows the workshop in progress.

Et voilà the final result.

Another specialty in French wedding: The French onion soup (Soupe à l’Oignon). I had been to several weddings but had yet tasted this infamous soup, mostly I went to bed too early and not every wedding served this. It was rare for me to stay up until 4-5am for a wedding but this time, at around 2am, I heard that there was onion soup coming so I stayed put. Yeah, I was very curious, and I was so glad that I stayed, as it tasted heavenly. It just warmed up my stomach so much so that I had a good night sleep later. Everyone should really try it.