The Story of Us Part 3 // Wedding Planning Sight Unseen
This is part 3 of our story! Part 1 // Part 2.
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People often joke that the easy way is never enough for us. So it should come as no surprise that we ended up planning a wedding 6,000 miles away, with a wedding planner we’d never met, in a venue we’d never seen, on a 3-month timeline.
It all started in college, when I had a vision of myself and my husband seated in royal thrones, covered in flowers. From then on, I had wanted to get married in a castle or palace. Turns out, Michia also wanted to get married in a castle after seeing some beautiful castles on his solo trip to Europe in 2014. So when he asked me if I wanted to get married in a castle, my only response was, "How'd you know that's what I've always wanted?"
And so we set out to find the perfect European castle for our venue. I knew it was possible because a Hungarian friend and colleague of mine had hosted camps in castles before. Turns out, there are castle rental websites, and some castles can even be found on Airbnb, or Vrbo. We spent weeks researching, scouring the internet for every possible European castle (venue) we could find. We ended up with a list of over 150 castles, categorized by sleeping capacity, city, and cost, among other things, and we went one by one and ranked them all. It made for quite the spreadsheet.
Meanwhile, we also reached out to a number of wedding planners that had castles on their websites, and one in particular, Andrea Vágvölgyi, stuck out to us. We spoke to her in September, and when she emailed us her list of potential venues, Tura Castle immediately stood out. Angelina Jolie's favorite castle, this architectural beauty had been abandoned for many years, but was being renovated into a 5-star hotel and event venue. It promised to sleep at least 45 and seat 60. We set a date for late June 2019, negotiated catering and hotel rooms, and had a signed a contract by the end of November, right after Thanksgiving. Venue set, we sent out our Save the Dates & Invitations, and moved on with planning!
Once we were locked into Hungary, we quickly found our photographer (Teodora Simon), our videographers (Bridal Film), and our Master of Ceremony (Misi)! MC's are a common practice in Hungary, and we really weren't sure we needed one, but he was the hit of the party! Everyone who came loved him, and we didn't regret it at all. But I'm getting ahead of myself. With these vendors booked, we really felt our wedding was going to be fully planned way ahead of schedule.
In early January, I was talking with my Hungarian coworker, and he said that while he was back in Hungary for the holiday break, he had tried to check in on Tura’s restoration and renovation progress, but he wasn’t able to go up to the castle at all: it was all roped off as a government project. Almost daily he would update me with any Hungarian news about the progress of the castle (there wasn’t much), and I was beginning to get a little worried it wasn’t going to finish in time.
It didn’t take long for my fears to come true. Late January, Andrea, our wedding planner, emailed us with some terrible news. Restoration of the castle was taking much longer than expected, and Tura was not going to be done by April, as originally promised. They were very behind, and there was no way to make the June date work — in fact, all weddings they had booked that summer (of which ours was the first) had to be canceled.
We were devastated. We had passed on hundreds of other castles in Europe for this one, and now they weren't going to be done? They couldn't even tell us when they would be open, so pushing to accommodate the venue was not an option. Now we had no venue, no catering, no housing, and honestly, it seemed, no wedding.
The next day, still reeling from our venue loss, the Pastor and friend who had agreed to officiate our wedding weeks earlier said he'd actually double booked our date and had to be in Jakarta for business the day of our wedding. It was far too much for me to handle that week, and I began breaking down at my desk at work.
I think Covid has given me some really fresh perspective on all our venue troubles — at least we weren’t forced to postpone or limit because of a global pandemic. But this really emphasizes the fact that the wedding is really just a day of celebration for a marriage. We can do our best to plan and get ahead of unforeseen circumstances, but at the end of the day, it’s far more about the person you navigate these challenges with. I could not have done this without M, and he really was my rock when all our carefully laid plans unravelled in a matter of hours.
With no venue and 6 months until our destination wedding, Andrea proved her weight in gold. She had been so upset and angry at Tura falling through (even moreso than us, it sometimes felt), and felt Hungarian pride was at stake.
Andrea sprung into action after Tura fell through. It seemed every day she was driving hours out of her way to vet, stalk or downright beg another castle to consider doing our wedding. At one point she even got the President of the Hungarian Castle Society involved. But despite her best efforts, things felt pretty hopeless. The good castles all booked out well in advance and the rest weren’t even close to Tura.
Having already sent invites, guests had already booked flights (back when flight changes were nontrivial expenses), leaving our window for the wedding super narrow. As our options continued to dwindle we started getting desperate, even considering hotel ballrooms and parks as backup options. We were only a few months from our wedding date with no venue and weeks passed with nothing but bad news. Each no was excruciatingly painful.
Meanwhile, it felt that everything had been put on pause. We had sent a message out to our guests that we were still committed to the Budapest area (given that we had already hired our team there and some guests had booked tickets), but with so much unknown, we couldn’t do much else. The only thing I could do was go shopping.
Every girl knows that without a venue, it’s impossible to find a dress, but I had set my heart on dressing for a castle wedding, even if we weren’t sure that was going to happen.
Wedding dress shopping is one of those magical but stressful experiences. When I tried on my first wedding dress (one week after our engagement, how embarrassing), I felt totally transformed, and felt, for the first time, that I was really going to be a bride. But I also felt so overwhelmed by the choices — from style, to material, to patterns, to color, to train, to price, not to mention whether to wear a veil, and how long that should be. I tried on well over 200 dresses at 20+ stores, over the course of 7 months, and in February, 4 months before our wedding, decided that none were perfect and I wanted to design my own. It wasn’t like we didn’t have a venue or anything.
Fortunately, my dad knows a couple in the wedding industry, Connie and Eric, and they know manufacturers in China that could make whatever I wanted — truly, the dream. So I designed what I wanted, and Connie helped me work with the manufacturer to design, make and ship my custom dress. I thought the entire thing would be a 6 week process, culminating in a made-to-exact-fit dress. But of course, nothing in our wedding planning could go according to plan. The first version of the dress ended up taking 8 weeks, but some pretty major structural changes had to be made, and by the time the dress was shipped over and I was able to pick it up, it was mid-May, 7 weeks later than I had anticipated, and the dress was too large. At this point, I only had 4 weeks before my wedding, and 3 weeks before flying out to Budapest.
I scrambled to find a tailor who would be able to finish in time, and several expedited tailoring trips later, I’m proud to say I had the most beautiful wedding dress, ending an 8 month journey to find something fit for our castle wedding.
Meanwhile, Michia’s tux took him one trip to Suit Supply.
Anyway, back to our venue fiasco. Many rejected venues later, we asked Andrea if we could host our wedding in Festetics Palace. Located about 2 hours from Budapest, Festetics Palace is the third largest and the most visited palace of Hungary. It is a beautiful museum, and looked like the perfect venue. There was only one problem… Festetics doesn’t host weddings.
But Andrea is one determined woman and eventually she was able to work her magic into a meeting with the castle’s director, and after telling them our love story and explaining the situation with Tura, the castle director agreed to make an exception so long as Andrea promised to be personally responsible for us and ensure nothing was damaged.
Andrea also got us back double the deposit we put down on Tura, which was a huge win, especially because weddings are always pricier than anticipated. We found out later that Andrea’s husband is a lawyer, and when she showed him the initial, Hungarian contract Tura had given us, he had changed the type of deposit in the contract to include a double payback of the deposit if they couldn’t keep the contract. Praise Jesus.
If you take away nothing else, know that Andrea is a beast. Go hire her.
Finally, we had secured our new venue, and we were able to move on with wedding planning, condensing an originally 12 month timeline into just over 3 months.
We were also able to find a new officiant, a good friend of ours that had never officiated a wedding, but we knew would do an amazing job. We would officially get married in California before flying out, so he didn’t need to be licensed.
Our venue no longer near Budapest or providing accommodation, we had to find a hotel that would sleep us all, and get people to book rooms. We also needed busses to take us from Budapest to Heviz, the town near our castle, and figure out how many people would need a ride. Getting RSVP’s is always the hardest part of a wedding, and it took many rounds of follow ups to get people to commit and book rooms.
We talked to all the hotels in the Heviz area, and Andrea personally visited the final hotel herself to make sure they would have the rooms and to get us a block room rate with a code guests could enter. Again, Andrea saved the day.
With only 2 months left to plan, we quickly found the rest of our vendors: a DJ, flowers, decorations, catering, bartending, cake, makeup, hair, entertainment, calligraphy, string quartet, and photo mirror.
We wanted our day to be super special, and decided from the beginning that we would have special surprises for the guests throughout the wedding. From a Chinese Tea Ceremony to a museum tour to a string quartet that would play pop music during the photo hour, we really hoped our guests would have an amazing time.
One of the last things we had to do was make sure we had rings to get married with. Michia didn’t think weddings bands mattered, and was planning to get super cheap bands from Amazon. I refused, wanting a band that matched my engagement ring (because, obviously). But Michia did get a super cheap band, which he is very proud of.
We searched around, and in early May, we ordered our wedding bands, ordering mine directly from the manufacturer overseas, in a pattern that was exactly what I was looking for. We paid for expedited shipping, and expected to get it in 2 weeks.
4 weeks later, however, the ring still had not arrived, and we were leaving soon. The ring was apparently caught in US customs, and the manufacturer didn’t know when it would clear.
We were bummed, but didn’t really have options. We waited until the absolute last minute to find a replacement, heading to Nordstrom Rack the day before we flew out to see if they had anything for us. The only ring that would really work as a substitute and would fit was a ring with a missing crystal in the band, but it would have to do. It was a symbol, after all, not the ultimate representation of our love. Plus, would it really be our wedding if a last minute turn of events didn’t happen to us?
On the day we were to fly out, we packed everything for our week in Hungary, wedding, and honeymoon, and left for SFO!
I had done my absolute best to keep my dress (and all wedding attire, really) a secret from Michia, but the giant, 50 lb garment bag gave at least a little away… It was no easy task traveling with it, and it made me quickly understand why some people book a second seat for their wedding dress. Fortunately, the airline hostesses were very kind and helped me hang the dress in the closet. We flew through London, though, and at the Gatwick airport, security made me take the dress out so they could examine it. To keep it a secret from my husband, they took me to a back room where I unzipped and hung the dress for them to scan.
The whole process took at least 30 minutes, but we made it through, and were soon landing in Budapest for a week of wedding errands and festivities!
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Besides the photo of Tura, all photo credit to Teodora Simon.