An unconventional wedding

Hi friends.

As announced, today I’ll start writing about some of the weddings I’ve been invited to. For the time being, all COVID allows us to do is remember past ceremonies and, out of those I went to recently, my little brother’s gets the top spot among the most unconventional ones.

The classic religious function was replaced by a just as classic civil rite at Luxembourg’s Hotel de Ville (or City Hall for the uninitiated in French), located in Place Guillaume II, the beautiful Northern European city-state main square. That late afternoon of October 2019, City Hall was invaded by a small heterogeneous group of fifteen wedding guests (seventeen including bride and groom), all coming from their respective countries (no locals were actually present).

The ceremony started at 4pm sharp (no room for any type of delay in Luxembourg, I can assure you), and ended about half hour later with the Italians throwing rice on the newlyweds, and the non-Italians exhibiting other types of rejoicing. It was just past 4:30pm and a light drizzle started to fall on the main square, the typical Luxembourg weather for most of the year, and, when we were about done with the customary photos and hugs (no COVID or social distancing yet), a freezing temperature started to make its way beneath coats and cloaks. 

The wedding dinner, a delicious and intimate banquet that was to take place in Grund (the lower side of the city), wouldn’t start before eight o’clock. 

The days before the wedding, I kept asking my brother whether he was aware that the guests, albeit few, were to be entertained somehow between the end of the ceremony and the beginning of the dinner. It wouldn’t have been nice saying goodbye at 4:30 with the promise of seeing everybody again at 8 at the restaurant, let alone staying outside in the freezing cold. A number of embarrassing scenarios could materialize, like: (a) the guests would get back to their hotels, take off their ceremony dresses at 4:30 only to put them on again at ten to eight, after a prolonged nap beneath the duvet; (b) ceremony dresses would get replaced by comfortable jeans and sneakers (why not?); (c) some out-of-control napping would hinder a punctual arrival at the restaurant, thereby losing a few guests out of the initial fifteen. The issue deserved some in-depth thinking and I admit I was quite insistent in demanding a viable solution.

In fact, I did offer “my” solution (well, almost), but what the newlyweds thought about turned out to be exciting and truly unconventional. Even though, I have to say, my solution was not bad at all, as it was two-pronged: given that the city of Luxembourg is kind of tiny, what I mentally felt like proposing (mentally because the newlyweds’ solution materialized so quickly that proposing mine would have been useless) was forming a sort of little parade led by the happy couple, complete with bouquet, stole and raincoat, and headed to the Grand Ducal Palace. The guided tour of the Grand Ducal Palace, though, ends each day at 5pm, so we’d have had too little time to dedicate to that activity. My real aim was to spend time at the Chocolate House, located right in front of the Ducal residence. A two-story place that smells of sugar, beautifully furnished with hardwood, where you can put on weight just by looking at the cakes, all rigorously in Northern European style: layers and layers of sponge cake, with deliciously textured chocolate cream in-between. A taste of the Mirabelle, the typical Luxembourg cake, would have been mandatory. Oh well, who knows, I’ll spare this proposal for the next occasion.

So, once finished with the customary pictures, the whole group started walking toward the nearest taxi stop, to reach the address the newlyweds instructed us to get to.

And that was a great idea, as at that address we found (and one can still find) the MUDAM, i.e., the Grand Duke Jean Museum of Modern Art, with its elegant cafeteria. We then gladly spent the few hours that separated us from the dinner wandering through the halls of the magnificent museum, browsing exhibits and chatting while seated at the cafeteria, where a local wine was served for the first of a long series of toasts.  

The groom, my brother, put a colored sticker on every one of us (like we used to do at kids’ parties) so that we would be free to move around the whole museum. Seeing the bride casually walk among objects of contemporary art, holding on to her white bouquet, was a vision! I guess she might have been easily mistaken for a living installation by some trans avant-garde artist.

In any event, I thought it was a fantastic idea.

Here is the museum.

Next Sunday I will follow up by going a little more in-depth on this unconventional wedding. Maybe some details of the newlyweds’ outfits? Or the bouquet? Or, rather, the dinner?

Write to you soon.

Stay tuned.