The wedding

Jeremy and I got married in Japan. We didn't have a ceremony, we essentially eloped but not on a whim. First we had to get "permission" from our consulates to say that we are not breaking any laws in our home countries. That took out two days and cost a wad of cash.

The, on Monday during Golden Week, we went to the ward office wearing neat summer casuals (it was a beautiful day) and waited in line to then try and explain what we were doing there using Jeremy's servicable Japanese.

We had to fill out a form and then go away and find two witnesses to sign the form. The moron at ECC refused, she said "this is serious in Japan." as if getting married in Australia or the US is a big joke. We just needed two people to confirm we are who we say we are. We returned home and asked our very kind neighbour and also had a friend who lives somewhere close by sign as well.

We returned and submitted the form. We got the small, official, unimpressive certificate, but we had to wait a week for the large, beautiful, frameable certificate. It is written in Kanji in the traditional right-to-left and vertical style, with even our names in Katakana. It's seriously the coolest wedding certificate I've ever seen. Actually, it's the only wedding certificate I've ever seen, but I think it's very cool anyway.

All in all, it took us 3 days of labour to get the certificate, but if we had known what we were doing and had a tendency to get out of bed before midday, we could have done it in a day.