Norwegian/Swedish Wedding

Last weekend, Morten and I went to Trondheim for a wedding. It was the wedding of the nice couple who we're currently staying with. The bride is Norwegian, and the groom is Swedish. Trondheim is the third biggest city in Norway (after Oslo and Bergen), located on north of Oslo. It takes around 8 hours from Oslo to Trondheim by car or train. Trondheim is also Morten's hometown and where his mother lives. We got married almost 2 years ago in Trondheim.
The wedding of our friends was actually in a city called Hell. Yes, Hell. The city became famous because of the name. Hell is only less than 30 minutes from Trondheim. So, we decided to stay in Trondheim so we could spend a little bit time with Morten's mom.
We took sovevogn, a night train with a room for sleeping on Friday night. It was a nice experience for me as I have never taken that kind of train before.
The wedding was actually for 3 days, 3 days party. The Friday evening party was a Swedish summer party. Lots of food, singing, and dancing, and of course fun, a party to celebrate summer, I was told. Too bad I had to miss it as I did not want to miss my Norwegian language class. Then the actual wedding at a church on Saturday afternoon which then followed by a reception, a formal party. And Sunday morning at 11, a casual-get-together to have brunch with leftover food from the previous evening party.
Some guests wore bunad, the Norwegian traditional outfits, including Morten. I learned that Norwegian wear their traditional outfits quite often for celebration events, which made me want to get an Indonesian traditional outfit for myself when I visit Indonesia next time. I have never thought of doing it before.
The wedding service at the church was of course in Norwegian, which I did not understand most of it. But I enjoyed looking at the bride and the groom happy faces. They looked so beautiful and handsome. Their 2 children also looked cute.
After the service was over, Morten talked to a lady that was sitting in front of us. She appeared to be Morten's former colleague. I was introduced to her and her boyfriend whose name sounded like 'Tumeric' to my ears. I was very certain that I had misheard it. Hmmm....confused. Later in the party, I got to talk to him more, and I found out that his name was actually 'Tom Erik', which pronounced exactly like tumeric. So, I had to tell him about it and explained to him how the spice looked like. Hehe...
He's a nice guy, by the way, a sport teacher at a school.
At the party, there were some speeches -- from the groom to the bride, from the father of the groom, from the brother of the bride (the bride has no father since she was little), the best man, and the maid of honor. I believed they were all great and touchy speeches. I saw many people wiping their tear. I didn't do that since I did not understand. I tried to laugh when people were laughing, though, hehe...
We also watched a short movie, from the bachelor party of the groom. It's a PG13, eventhough no striptease party. Hehe...
There was another fun Swedish wedding party tradition. When the bride leaves the room, all ladies are allowed to kiss the groom. Likewise, when the groom does so, all men are allowed to kiss the bride. So, when the bride left the room for the first time, some Swedish guests ran around the room, and encouraged the ladies to approach the groom. I saw that the Norwegian guests were confused. So, I explained the tradition to the Norwegian ladies who were sitting besides me. I learned about the tradition in my wedding from the groom who was our guest at that time. After we kissed the groom, we were talking among us that we were supposed to put lots of lipstick before kissing the groom. Hehe...
I met many nice people there. I tried to speak Norwegian with them. It was fun as I understood most of what my new acquitance said. One of the guests, she's a sister-in-law of the bride was Chinese. So, it was nice to speak some Mandarin, too. By 1AM, I told people..."That's enough, from now on, I'm going to speak English." I was overloaded. I didn't realize that it took so much of my energy to converse in Norwegian. I didn't want to talk in Norwegian the day after, either. It wasn't all true, though. I did speak some Norwegian again. And what funny was I did that to the Chinese girl. Hehe... Morten was teasing me about it.
I was very happy to be invited to the wedding. You're a very special person to either the bride or the groom if you're invited to a wedding. Unlike the weddings in Indonesia or some weddings that I have been to in the States, the weddings here are very personal to the bride and the groom. I am very happy that I already have good friends here in Norway.