Wow. Like… WOW.
That’s pretty much all I said for five minutes when Sani & Mike’s Chinese / Jewish (can I say ‘Chewish’?!) wedding landed in my inbox. It’s the perfect first real wedding to kick off 2016 with as it epitomises the STG mantra of your Jewish wedding day, your way. So for Sani & Mike that meant peking duck, Jewish wedding traditions, a Taiwanese tea ceremony, honey cake, table tennis, street feast food stalls, table tennis, a boat trip down the Thames, and so many more ideas that reflected them both.
This is a particularly inspiring post for couples planning a wedding that combines two different cultures — it’ll give you the confidence to plan exactly the kind of wedding that feels right for you. On a frivolous note, Sani and Mike totally nailed their red colour scheme (red is the traditional colour of good luck in Taiwanese weddings) so if you’re looking to thread a specific colour through your big day, you’ll be inspired by lots of their ideas.
I also absolutely LOVE that they devised an ‘adventure through London’ for their wedding guests (read the bride’s wedding report below for more on that!). After the ‘London escapade’ part to their day, Sani and Mike chose the vaults at central London’s RSA House for their party venue. I’m a huge fan of RSA House as it has a plethora of beautiful traditional spaces, but you can get entirely creative with their ‘underground chamber’ vaults too. Sani, the Bride, explains:
We wanted to have a bit of festival feel across the vault spaces… so the guests could pick and choose what they wanted to do, be it playing table tennis, singing karaoke with the Rockaoke live band, dancing, or watching England vs. Wales rugby on an iPad by the bar.”
Let me hand you over to Sani now for her full report, exquisitely documented by the hugely talented Andrew Billington, and wish מזל טוב and æå–œ to the Bride and Groom!
how we met
Sani, the Bride: Mike and I have been friends for years, having been introduced by mutual friends, just after university about eight years ago. We got to know each other through parties and mutual friends, but gradually got closer over the years, and then played in a band together which resulted in spending even more time in each others company.
It definitely was not love at first sight and we used to genuinely annoy the hell out of each other and have massive shouting matches, storming out of rooms, slamming doors and calling each other all sorts of names! In fact, if you had told either of us four years ago that we’d end up marrying each other, you would have been declared mad and laughed out of the room.
Mike and I both had different partners throughout our friendship but I guess all that bickering, winding each other up and arguing, spending so much time together, living on top of each other in the lead up to gigs and band recordings, resulted in a closeness which we then finally and very reluctantly realised was love. Needless to say, most of our close friends were not that surprised and if anything, relieved that all the public shouting matches have stopped since we got together!
