Let's play catch-up!

I'm back! Hurray, hurray! We made it back ok despite ash cloud and everything. They shut down the airports the day before we travelled but re-opened them for us. We felt very special. ;-)  Not only let they back into the country, Air Canada was especially nice to us and we had our own check-in counter. When we walked into the terminal we went over to the international counters. The lines were loooong. But then we noticed one empty counter. For some reason, the London flights get their own counter while everybody else has to go to the normal ones. Sweet deal. We were the only ones there and could check-in immediately. This is what it must feel like to book business.

But let's go back to the beginning of our trip. At the airport before we left at the gate next to us was a Dreamliner. Now I am not a techno geek, but that plane looked impressive. It doesn't really show in the picture, but trust me, it is BIG.

Enough about planes though. The first weekend we were in Toronto. On Saturday we went to a birthday dinner at Ki, a Japanese restaurant. The food was delicious especially the dessert. I had ice-cream: green tea, red bean, and black sesame. Originally I was most excited about the green tea, which turned out to be really nice, but the real surprise was the black sesame. It was so good! Tasted like roasted sesame, but colder and sweeter. Hard to describe. The red bean ice-cream was good too, the sweetest out of the bunch. They complemented each other well. Would love to have some today as it is sunny outside!

The next day was mother's day so we went out to visit bf's mom and aunt. Picked up a wedding cake book on the way there. bf's mom is retired but as a hobby she started to make wedding cakes. She loved her present, it had blue-prints for flower patterns and the like in the back. You could see how she was already planning to incorporate those into her next cakes.

After the weekend we took it easy. The weather was not really nice, rain, wind, cold. So we opted to stay in most of the time and hung out and read and watched TV. Very relaxing. One of the days we met up with bf's mom and aunt again and had some nice lunch. Another day we used to go shopping. We picked up some more books since we were finishing ours too quickly. When the weather was good we went on nice little walks. Good times. Sorry, no pictures. Just not good at that.

But on Friday we made our way to the Waterloo-Kitchener area for the wedding. Checked into our really nice hotel in the afternoon. bf booked us a suite because it didn't really cost more than a normal double room. It turned out to be much bigger than our actual apartment! Sweet. Our friends' had put a gift bag into our 'living room'. Had a bottle of wine and all kinds of sweets and nuts in there! We ended up leaving most of those with bf's dad, but I really appreciated it. Was a lovely gesture. 

Our lovely hotel in Kitchener. I loved the town. Used to have a lot of German immigrants so a lot of place names are German.

Unfortunately we didn't have that much time to enjoy our huge suite. We made our way to the formal wear shop to pick up bf's suit. Stupid buggers ordered the vest in the wrong size so we ended up having to come back the next day just before the wedding to pick that up. Stupid. And then we basically headed straight for the rehearsal. The church they picked was a little bit outside of the city. The part was called St. Jacobs. Had a lot of little shops and cafes. I loved it there. When we were there on Friday evening it was really empty. But the next day it was packed. Must be one of those weekend spots were all the city people end up going relaxing on the weekend. There was an ice-cream place across the street that I wanted to try, but there was no time.

Everything went well and we went to a nice restaurant for dinner. It was really laid back no speeches or anything. The one thing we did was we had two big glass jars where we threw in papers with instructions. One for the bride one for the groom. Some of them were chores, like 'You should always bring out the garbage', others were 'On football Sunday you shall always make chicken wings and have beer around'. Things like this. We wrote the instructions during dinner and they read them out afterwards. Good fun. The food was good, but again it was the dessert that stood out to me. It was white chocolate cheesecake with a berry sauce. The amazing thing was that the cheesey part of the cake was wrapped in a really thin dough and it looked like it was deep-fried. The cake itself then was really fluffy and creamy. Heaven! I think some people went out after dinner for drinks, but we wanted to preserve our energy and went back to the hotel. 

Pina Colada! Yum, yum.

One of three bouquets. There were also three tables. Coincidence?

Amazing cheesecake. See how the dough is wrapped around it. It's really crisp too.

The next day we had a nice breakfast (bagel) and then went for a walk. Had to waste a little bit of time before we could pick up the vest. I think we got dressed just after noon and drove over to the hotel were the groom stayed. bf went up and they took tons of pictures with all the best men. I just hung out in the bar and read and had a drink. After that it was straight to church. Positioned myself in one of the front rows to take pictures. bf was in the wedding party so I kinda had to spend some time on my own. The fun part was that the bride's grandparents sat right next to me. I overheard them speaking in German so I figured might as well be a little sociable and get to know people. Let's just say they were delighted to find another German in the building. Had a really nice conversation with them. They told me about them immigrating to Canada about 50 years ago (wow) and then we started talking about my bf because they knew him from when he was in High School. So I got some nice stories. 

So I was well entertained in the time we waited for all the wedding parties to show up. The bride was fashionably late. But everything else went smoothly. The ceremony was nice and short. We has some good laughs when the bride messed up some of her lines and was really cute about it. For those who are interested, the bridemaids all wore black dresses that they got themselves and all carried little windmills with them. The groomsmen all wore black suits and had a little windmill attached where you usually would put a flower. Some were green some were yellow. The bride had a black and white one. No bouquets. After church we went out into the fields for the pictures. The bridesmaids got to wear green shawls for that. The wind was really strong and it was freezing because of that even though the sun was shining. They also took pictures in an apple orchard and in front of apple crates. Can't wait to see those. I think they will turn out really nice.

One of the orchard that pictures were taken in.

Wellies for the bride. She was the only one prepared to step out into the fields.

See how windy it is. There is a windmill somewhere on the left side. This is the only pictures I felt comfortable posting with people in it. I didn't ask anybody's permission to post them on my blog (since none of them know I have one). How do you deal with that? I saw some wedding pictures on blogs that I read and they always included people. Do you ask for permission first or just post away?

That probably took over an hour to get all the pictures. We then went back to the hotel to drop off the car and took a cab over to the reception. It was a the Canadian glass institute or something like that. Glass and ceramics pieces everywhere, I was little bit scared that I would break things, but luckily these were only in the reception area. The actual dinner area was clear of any breakable things, well except for the dinnerware.

Reception area. See the lovely baby clothes on the top?

What I thought was really neat were the place markers. Every place had an old book on it with a bookmark and a name. They made the bookmarks themselves and had a picture of them on there and the wedding details. Really neat. And I love books, so obviously I was smitten. The dinner was really nice, but again, I loved the dessert. It was chocolate pudding/mousse. Really creamy with some whipped cream and strawberries. Delicious! The photographers were there too. They had some goofy props with them so people took funny pictures. There was lots of dancing and drinking. It was a really lovely evening. I also liked that the couple had given out lists with hotels that most people ended up staying in and they then organised buses at different times that took people back to the hotels. That's how we got home, on the last bus. Very convenient. 

The pot in the middle contains some yellow tulips.

The wedding cake(s)

Little windmill for the guys. The ones the girls carried were much bigger.

The next day we met up with some friends and had a big brunch. After that we dropped of the suit and went back to Toronto. We visited some family before heading back to bf's dad. Monday was really filled with packing and moping around. bf's dad and stepmom had taken the day off to spend some time with us plus it was bf's stepmom's birthday. bf's mom picked us up in the afternoon and drove us to the airport. I must say I loved our vacation but it should have been longer. I didn't get over my jet-lag till almost the end of the week and then it was basically already time to go home. We got back into London on Tuesday morning. After unpacking and doing laundry we planned to take a short nap and then do some grocery shopping. Well, that never happened. We went to bed at 10am and didn't wake up till 4.30pm. Upsi. Yeah, basically had dinner then since we hadn't eaten anything yet. I wanted to go to bed early then but wasn't tired. Ended up going to bed at midnight but couldn't sleep. Work the next day was hell, I just couldn't keep my eyes open. Thursday was alright and now I am over it. Ah I think I am getting older. Body doesn't handle it that well anymore.

While we are on that subject. It was my birthday on Thursday. So we went out for pizza that night. Lovely food. I got some nice things at work. A voucher for a bookstore (bf said, oh no, not more books!), some nice tea, cider and chocolates! Good stuff. I mentioned once at work that I don't like to receive presents that cannot be used up or just serve decorative purposes. Somebody listened (thank you) and now I get things I really love. bf listened too. A nice package from Amazon arrived yesterday and I got some nice manga, that he knew I was looking for, and New Super Mario Brothers Wii! Yay. Haven't played it yet (since I thought I better catch up on my blog) but will definitely do today. Really excited about this one.

This blogpost is getting much longer than I attended. Apologies. I just wanted to get it all out of the way. Even though I enjoyed the vacation I am glad to be back. The weather turned really nice. It's sunny and warm. bf feels a little sick today, but I will be going grocery shopping in a bit and enjoy the weather on the way. You should do the same!

And here for the people who are interested:

Me! I ended up not wearing any of the jewellery, only the red hair-tie with the flower. Felt very comfortable like that though.