• Wedding – Our big day
• Garden party
• All Pages

I went back to Hluboká, where I met our wedding manager Plha, who showed up on a motor bike. I showed him, how to get from the castle to the game preserve, where he should take all invited guests. Then we had lunch at the Švejks and I was free from then on. I went to Munice and spent a pleasant afternoon by reading Wild and Bad from Kulhánek. Please notice – no stress.

Lenka had her hair done in ČB (little stressful was that the hairdresser said that her hair probably would not ever dry). Lea was taking care of her nicely, making sure that she ate a cheese roll, and then took her to Sudárna to the trade school boarding house, where we boarded the family and few friends. That is where Lenka dressed, and Lea did her make up. I have to say that she did a good job, elegant - I even recognized her.

There is a funny story to the Lenka’s stay at the school boarding house. She was coming to the house, hair made, and she met Mařenka Písecká, who she had met several times before, in a hallway. Who knows what Mařenka thinking was, but she came to Lenka and asked, “And who are you? A bridesmaid?”

We arranged for picture taking inside of the castle, before the ceremony. This was a wedding gift of a friend of mine Jitka Machová, a boss of castle guides. We met the photographer and his assistant in the courtyard and went to the castle. We took some shortcuts and tried to avoid visitor groups. I have really pretty pictures from the castle, look at the photo gallery. Reactions of people groups, which we met from time to time, were interesting. Czechs did not do anything, just looked at the bride, foreigners usually smiled at us, and even clapped once.

Picture taking took an hour and we had enough at the end. You can see it on me on the last picture. By that time it was almost four o’clock, so we hurriedly went around the castle and hurried to the ceremony hall, but found nobody inside. Everybody was waiting around the fountain; it was quite surprising to see them there, since up to that time there were only six of us. Somehow they did not want to go inside the castle, so I had to go to get them. There was also my mother among the people, who hesitated all day, whether she should go to the wedding or not. Luckily, she decided to go to the ceremony at least. She told me later that it was beautiful and that she enjoyed it. But the talking that went on before; it just would not be her, if everything should go quietly.

By that time it was 15:55 and Lenka’s witness Jirka was nowhere to be seen. We could not even get him on the phone. Jirka Rogalewicz was just pulling out his ID card (Jirka as Jirka, so who cares) to substitute, when the witness showed up all of the sudden at 15:59:30. Reportedly they were delayed on the way from Prague, and he changed in the car in front of the castle.

Martina, the Registrar, wrote down all ID cards, and some lady welcomed us at the castle. I interpreted the introductory speech to English. Not that I was nervous, but I could not recall the word "bride", so I made Lenka a future wife. Then we went in.

We had our own music, recorded on a CD. We wanted specific songs for entrance, exchange of rings, and for leaving. I wrote down everything on a piece of paper and explained it to the lady, who was taking care of it, and hoped that she would not screw it up. And she didn’t. She even adjusted the volume so nicely that the music background perfectly helped the atmosphere. Everything was just perfect that day.

First I walked in with my mother, then all the guests, the ones who were able to make an espalier, and then came Lenka with Franta. People, who could, sat down, we remained standing. Then Tomáš Jirsa showed up and Pavla in a role of an interpreter. Tomáš had nice personal and funny speech that was interpreted by Pavla on the go (although she had it promised beforehand and Jirsa did not send it) with the fun not lost in the translation. You could even see and hear, how we laughed on the video. Every ceremony should go like this. Not that two people suffer through it and want it to be over. We enjoyed it, and because Pavla was well understood, so did our guests, who could maybe say pivo (beer) in Czech, and that was just about it.

After the ceremony we went outside, first the guests, then us. It turned out, how people forget things under the influence of events. None of us remembered that we gave our IDs to the Registrar, and that we should take them back. The Registrar, apparently, was used to it, since she gave all the documents to Lucka, who gave them to us later (they were no good afterwards anyway, so what).

Taking pictures after ceremony is necessary evil for guests, so we decided to do it differently. We only did a few pictures with everybody and sent the people in a file to the game preserve with Plha. A small outside refreshment and the wedding newspaper was waiting for them there. We figured that the picture taking would last for maximum of one hour, and it worked out just right, they had some appetizers and fun with the wedding paper in the meantime. We had done several photos in the castle garden at that time and then went to the preserve, too.

After we arrived, the hall door opened, we went in, sat down and started the feast. There was not much drinking, so the wedding was quiet. Filip Zbořil, who was taking care of the food and drink, said that he had never seen so quiet wedding (note - David had two glasses of wine and one of them ended in a notebook). It was too quiet for the Danes, too, so they decided to make it more interesting by noise from time to time, and I and Lenka had to kiss.

We had reproduced music from the notebook and square danced a little. The first newlywed dance was a Mainstream prepared for us by Jirka Rogalewicz. I prepared a C1 singing call The Rose for Lenka as a surprise, because she likes this song. The only thing is that I had to start twice, since these rascals fell apart right in the first sequence. I wrote down that I would not sing the Vertical Tag at the next wedding.

I had an accident during the celebration, because I poured a glass of wine into my caller’s notebook. The notebook was gone, of course, luckily one of the wedding guests, Lenka’s friend David, saved us as far as music, because he arrived with his notebook.

Outside of dancing we were unpacking gifts, had funny raffle and cut the cake. I don’t know why, but sometime around one at night all guests started leaving, and we were left alone with personnel. I felt a little sorry about it, but the wedding was probably too quiet (Lenka: My guess would be that most of the guests thought that they needed to save their strength for the next day). We finished the evening by helping the personnel to clean up and load things to the cars. Everything was done by three, and Filip with his helpers left. We stayed and went to our wedding room. The Moon was shining and we had our wedding night in front of us.

Surprisingly we woke up at eight the next day. We got up, since there was a lot of work waiting for us in order to prepare an afternoon garden party. The cabin was fortunately cleaned at night, so we loaded our things – mainly gifts – to the car and left. Still the loading took us about an hour. We had to take care of several details, like returning the keys from the game preserve, and we needed to be at Holkov, where the party should take place, at one.

The party was starting at four, but we did not just hang around for those three hours, but I and Lenka and three people from personnel were preparing tables, bar, sound system, fire, and food.

Almost all invited people arrived at four – almost seventy of them. This was a surprise for me, I thought that they would arrive one by one. The foreigners came in a convoy led by Vašek Fencl.

Most of our drinks were still from Friday, we took mainly beer and food from the boarding house. As far as food we had grilled meat, veggies, chicken fried steaks, and things like that. Everybody had a chance to fry a sausage on an open fire. This was an unknown fun for our foreigners, so we showed them that sausages needed to be cross-cut to be done right and not to split.

We square danced in regular intervals, and it even came to dancing of parents with the bride. Unfortunately, Franta was not taken by square dancing at all. Pity.

 There were even guitars and singing together. Most of the people left around eleven at night, so there was only us and the Rogalewiczs left. We sat with them until very late at night (or early morning?). I took only some things with me to the room, just the ones dew would get into, like loudspeakers and the notebook. Unfortunately, we found out that it was a mistake in the morning, since during these few hours somebody stolen my caller case with mixing console, microphone, and cables, and we also lost two wedding gifts – iron and sheeting. Considering the dark that was in the shed, where these things were, somebody had to show up with a light, otherwise he could not find these things.

We spent the Sunday in bed and alternately slept and read (me) and browsed the net (Lenka). We downright enjoyed a free day after demanding, but beautiful weekend.