A wedding & a final farewell

A key date that much of our trip pivoted around had finally arrived: the wedding of our good friends, Em & Jon, in Sweden. We would arrive in Stockholm on the Friday, attend the wedding on the Saturday, and spend Sunday night saying our goodbyes before flying back to London and out to Bangkok.

Many of our good friends would be at the wedding, including a couple who had moved to New York around the time we embarked on our travels, so the wedding promised to be a well-timed reunion.

We were taken by coach to the venue - a beautiful lakeside castle with various buildings that served as accommodation with areas set aside for dinner and dancing. There was even a sauna which got some use (interspersed with mad running jumps into the icy lake) at the end of the evening.

It was an absolutely stunning wedding, organised perfectly yet effortlessly by the bride and groom with myriad personal and fun touches. Jon is English so the Union Jack and Scandinavian cross flanked the castle on twin flagpoles. The table plan included photographs of all the guests with flags denoting their nationality. Menus were provided on personalised postcards, stamped with images of the guests, postmarked by country and written in the appropriate language. The food and wine were matched and were a blend of Swedish and British fare.

There were songs and laughter and wonderful speeches, culminating in the bride's surprise for the groom, a music video her brother had shot, starring Emma lip-syncing Take That's "Rule the World", invoking every love ballad cliche from sitting in a window gazing at a framed photo of Jon, through striding triumphantly along a deserted road, to spinning joyously in a field of daisies. Finally, they had "their song", a tongue-in-cheek gesture as Jon outwardly projects discerning taste in music but was outed by his new wife as harbouring a penchant for boy-band Take That and a secret man-crush on Gary Barlow.