Two

Bad news. Our chef de cuisine refused to work in the old and (very) restricted kitchen of the community room we picked - the one in which we had always wanted to have our wedding.

We would for nothing in the world change with another one, so we switched to plan B and went ahead for a two-venues wedding: a cocktail party in the original room we wanted and a wedding dinner in another room with a kitchen that suited our chef de cuisine. He agreed to it and gave us the address of the room with his standard of "adequate kitchen".

We called to check out the room during our Christmas break. It was a room in another Alsatian village next to a highway - about two exits away - to Strasbourg, Alsatian capital. The kitchen turned out to be very well equipped and certainly fitted for a chef looking for a perfect condition in breeding out his masterpieces but we worried about the room itself. This is very far from the friendly and cosy atmosphere we wanted.


My husband-to-be cheered me up and said that we could certainly do something with the decoration to fix it up. Knowing that we did not have much time - works were stacked full at office and wedding was due in 6 months time - to go back and forth from Paris to Alsatia looking for another room agreed by our chef, I reluctantly agreed.

I braced myself for the challenge - this was a real test to prove that I did merit my architect diploma - and the tons of work that waited to take that gymnasium-look off the room.

Last single girl's Christmas

My last Christmas as a single girl. Everyone was teasing me about how relieved my parents must have been knowing how fussy they are about old girls - especially when it comes to their own daughter.

I had never been very close with my future sister-in-law - not that she is not nice because she is, indeed - for a reason we do not really know, perhaps the distance, perhaps our very different characters.

Anyway, this Christmas she - and her adorable boyfriend, but I bet that it was her idea - offered me a present that touches me: my hairdo for the wedding day and the trial session. Then she hugged me in a sort of welcome-to-the-family-hug. I loved it, it made me feel really like entering the family.

I also received a mini set of Miss Dior Chérie beauty care that I kept for my wedding day containing a small perfume, shower gel, and body lotion of the same fragrance. It is extremely difficult to find a fragrance as a gift to someone and my future sister-in-law actually picked something that suits me very well.

Food

In a country like France, where cuisine is a serious - if not the most serious - matter, the food you serve for a wedding is THE most important decision to take above all. More important than the wedding attire, the venue, the music, than ... all!

In our case, having guests varying from locals, different French regions, European countries, and even distant destinations such as China, Japan, Australia, and Indonesia, we would like to have something distinctly Alsatian while not sticking to traditional heavy Alsatian cuisine.

We took advantage of my future mother-in-law's thick address book - she was a former international school headmaster in Strasbourg - to select our chef de cuisine.

During Christmas dinner in her home, we decided together to confide our wedding dinner to a particular chef from a local Ecole Hôtelière and his students. Knowing his and the school's reputation, it was an obvious choice. We needed someone who could provide us with full-service dinner on table and he proposed us exactly what we wanted : elegant but simple dinner orchestrated with his maître d'hôtel and waiters.

We just could not wait to see the result!