Manila Bulletin

Baguio will always be special

At first look, our wedding can be considered simple and straight to the point. Nothing pretentious was something we agreed upon. We skipped a lot of the usual wedding traditions, because what we really wanted was a night where we could celebrate our love with our closest family and friends.

The most significant part of the wedding was the location. Baguio will always be a special place for us. My husband loved going to Baguio when he was young. During our first trip together, in celebration of our monthsary, he showed me his favorite spots, restaurants, and activities. They instantly became one of my favorite places as well. Our connection with Baguio grew more because my husband proposed there on the night of my birthday in front of our close friends. It was done in the cool outdoors in front of a campfire while we were enjoying our drinks and making smores. Our wedding day is a bigger reflection of that night, elements of the proposal were there like the cold weather, drinks, and the bonfire.

Our wedding was a representation of how we are as a couple. If you ask our friends, my husband and I are very chill. I remember our coordinator telling us that he really enjoyed planning our wedding because it was a simple wedding—straight to the point with no fuss. We told him we just wanted to have a good time.

Our wedding dance was originally supposed to be a slow dance because that is what was expected. The night before our wedding while we were practicing, my husband told me that the slow dance didn’t feel like it was “us.” That’s when we decided that our first dance would be to BTS’ “Permission to Dance.” My husband and I are both BTS ARMY, and my husband’s sister helped us choreograph the dance. We had to tell the coordinator about the change right before the reception. We did not care if we looked unprepared or funny, we just wanted to have a good time. One for the books is how challenging it was to plan a wedding when we both didn’t have a “dream wedding” in mind. The only thing my husband requested while planning the wedding was to have it in Baguio. Planning an out-of-town wedding in the middle of the pandemic was a feat in itself, with cases going up and down depending on the new variants of Covid. We also had to be updated with the restrictions of Baguio. It also did not help that our choice of venue was outdoors. It even came to a point, in the middle of our

wedding plans, we were playing with the idea of not having guests at all because of the pandemic.

We were just sure that we were going to get married on our chosen date with or without guests, no postponement. We were definitely not prepared for the Omicron variant that came in a month before our wedding. When we were planning the wedding, we were hoping that Covid would be a thing of the past—something we would just talk about during the “remember when” moments of the conversion. I remember last December 2021 cases were going down to as low as 300 cases per day and we were confident that everyone who confirmed their attendance would be there.

January came and the number of cases of people getting sick were going up. With less than a month from our wedding day, we had to check again with the guests if they could still attend. Almost half of our guests canceled because of the fear of getting the virus but most of our closest friends and relatives still pushed through.

We originally planned to have 150 guests, but because of the Omicron variant our guest list was cut down to 75. My husband and I were a bit sad because of the last minute cancellations, but everyone who made it to our wedding didn’t make our day feel like it was less than a hundred people.

The highlight of our wedding was the after party. Everyone stayed to drink and dance. There weren’t many posts online from the guests. Some of them told us they were not able to take videos or photos, because they were in the moment and were having fun. And that’s what we are all about—having fun with our family and friends on our special day.

REAL WEDDINGS

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2022-05-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-05-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

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