Learn Australian English in this new interview episode of The Aussie English Podcast where Kel & I Talk about Our Wedding & Marriage in Australia.

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AE 506: Kel & I Talk about Our Wedding & Marriage in Australia

What a beautiful day! I have just woken up and it is so calm out here on the deck. Anyway, I am putting together currently, I mean, you’re about to listen to it, I’m putting together the episode for the podcast where we talk about our wedding, we got married! Let me show you! On the weekend and it was an amazing experience and I had a few questions from some of the people who had seen that we got married on Instagram, can you talk about…

What have you got in your face, mate? This is my folks’ dog, ah he’s got sand, he’s been on the beach.

So, they were asking about talking about Western culture and marriage here. And so, we didn’t have the typical marriage as you’ll find out in this episode, but yeah Kel I sit down, we chat for about 24 minutes or so about the wedding, about marriage in Western society, in Australia, and also in Brazil as well.

Hopefully you get heaps of vocab, heaps of expressions, different things to talk about marriage if you guys are already married or going to get married in the future so, be a good episode to learn about how to talk about those things and you’ll also obviously get to hear about what the day was like. So, yeah and apologies that I didn’t get an expression episode out on Sunday, that was the day after the wedding, the wedding was on Saturday and I didn’t have enough time, had friends down was entertaining then, was with Kel and was also hungover and sobering up on the Sunday. Anyway, let’s get into this episode.

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You ready to rock? Now you have to do it. Nah, nah, you do it. You’ve got to do “What’s up, guys? Welcome to this episode of Aussie English.” No, you do it. Go for it. You have to do it. No, go for it. No, you do it. No you got to do it. No. You got this. No, no, baby. Go for it. You got it. No, no. Go for it.

G’day, guys! Welcome to this episode of Aussie English. See how easy that was?

Today we’re going to be talking about the wedding. Achievement unlocked!

Achievement unlocked! Good.

So, where do you want to start, Kelly? What’s the… so, once upon a time there was YouTube.

There was… I think everyone pretty much knows about how we met and things like that.

So, we can fast forward through that, we met on YouTube. Kelly commented on a video. I saw she was Portuguese. Well, Brazilian speaking Portuguese and I was like hey do you want to practice? like oh yeah by the way you’re also really cute.

And then fast forward one year three months and you’d moved down here.

Yes.

And we were in a relationship. Fast forward nine months. We’d gone to Canberra. Kelly got a job there and then Kelly quit the job to study back in Melbourne. Kelly got pregnant.

Another achievement unlocked.

Another achievement unlocked. And then we also organised the wedding as well, but the wedding was going to be obviously November 17.

Yes. So, the first idea we had was… we always wanted something really simple and low key and like not of people, my family is now here, so…

That was the difficult thing here. We either married in Brazil with all of your family, none in my family, or we get married here with all of my family none of your family.

But to go to Brazil there would be a lot of money spent…

Especially considering we would come back here.

So, we decided to, you know, just have a celebration here with your family and some friends of ours and but we were going to do there at the Magistry, I believe that’s what it’s called.

Where were going to go just to the…I guess the city hall or whatever it is and a sign the documents and just have it officially done without any big ceremony as such.

But then we thought well we already live in an Ocean Grove.

We found the celebrant.

Oh yes, true! The day we were going to Melbourne to, you know, give the papers the Registry whatever. We realized we needed a celebrant and there was a bit of a misunderstanding, on the website Deaths and Marriages and Births wherever, they are quite clear. Like if you have to arrange your own celebrant or if you just give in the papers, you sign everything and they arrange everything for you. But basically, I thought well…we do have to celebrate, we haven’t arranged that. So, I just googled something like wedding celebrants, non-religious, whatever in Melbourne.

Because we didn’t want to get married at a synagogue, church, mosque or anything like that, it was just we need someone who says the words can do the documents, the legal documents and then can obviously hand those in.

And we found Mr. Wayne.

We found Wayne. So, somehow Kel found…I think you emailed a bunch of these people who were just listed so, there’s obviously some kind of list of registered celebrants and.

He replied to me really quickly and he was happy to meet us in Melbourne, he lives in Melbourne in his apartment. The funny thing was, when we got there, one, he’s not a average celebrant.

He’s a surgeon and his wife is an obstetrician. So, a doctor for children or for giving birth, right? And so we would just like it what? Why would you be a celebrant and yet you’re a… you’re probably a millionaire, you know, like a surgeon and he’s just like I retired and I just did this for fun now and he mainly just married friends so, he was like how did you guys find me because I don’t marry people I don’t know, usually?

Usually his friends and people he knows.

It’s much easier for him to work with them.

And he just does it as a hobby, of a way of meeting people and getting out into something interesting and fun to do.

And we were just like this random couple, knocking at his door like hey, can you marry us? And he was absolutely amazing, friendly, like really…He has a good sense of humor.

So, I think he asked us where are you planning on getting married? What do you want to do? Blah blah blah. And we were just like well…we had just planned to go to the Registry just sign the documents. Do you want to do that? And then he was like… better idea, we’ll do it somewhere nice, you know, we can do it in Melbourne, you could do it at my apartment, you could do it somewhere near your place in Ocean Grove. And then he mentioned the fact that he goes down there every second weekend or something to learn how to make gin, in a gin distillery, a place where they distill gin close here and we were like oh maybe we’ll check that place out because he said you can get married there. It’s very new, it’s really cute. You know, they serve food, they serve the gin and the whiskey that they make there as well as other drinks. So, it’s a nice kind of…kind of equivalent of a vineyard, right? Like if you guys go to a wine tasting places and vineyards it’s kind of like that, but it’s for whiskey and gin there’s no wine or vines there. So, that was really cool, we went and checked that out.

Yeah…everything was so random and unusual, right?

Unplanned.

Unplanned, true. We went there and we absolutely loved the place. Is his name Russ?

Russ, as in Russell.

The owner of the whiskery.

Not like Ross, from Friends. Russ.

He was just great with us, really generous.

Really friendly guy.

You guys just come, you know, the place is yours, you know.

It was all free.

All free.

The thing was too, he was like I’m not going to close the venue down for you, guys, because he has other people who come and they buy drinks and do everything because it’s open to anyone, but you guys can do it for free so, you just find a little area you guys can get married there and then afterwards you can get drinks, you can get food, you can do whatever you want on the grounds.

And because he had such a small group of people, I think we were 17?

Yeah there’s probably about 17 to 20 of us maximum, not over 20.

It was great because, you know, everyone could chat to one another and like just enjoy themselves, we didn’t have to give attention to a lot of people. Everyone was having fun.

That’s it, because, I mean, it’s probably hard for you, guys, to… I guess realise or notice what I’m like, but I’m pretty modest or at least I’m not even modest, but I just don’t like attention. Like I can do this sort of stuff, obviously, and I enjoy doing this, but when it comes to like people paying direct attention to me and, you know, me standing up in front of a group of people and especially when it’s like they’re there to congratulate you, you know, birthdays for instance, I hate birthdays and I don’t mind groups of people and teaching and stuff, but when it comes to people going Oh well, that’s amazing, that’s so good Pete, I’m like don’t to do that.

So, I was like not a big waiting I don’t want to invite extended family I just kind of want friends and family close friends and family there and keep it really small and we’ll get it done fast. Fortunately, Kel was the kind of person who wasn’t after a huge wedding either, mainly because you want to save money and not to spend out the wazoo so, we could talk about that too so, we had a small wedding. Friends and family, less than 20 people. The venue was free. So, there you go.

Yeah, we were really lucky.

The celebrant was 400 dollars, which is pretty cheap. That’s the standard, I think, it would be about a few hundred bucks. usually, especially for simple weddings like that. The rings, we can talk about this. This is a white gold, so Kel and I went to… I can’t remember the name of the place…

Jersens? Something like that.

Yes, something in Melbourne and she was pretty much like we want wedding bands. This is called a wedding band, where it’s just a plain ring and she’s like cheapest ones you’ve got, but for context, mine was about 900 dollars for the whole process, Kel’s was over 500 dollars so, you’re looking at about fifteen hundred bucks for white gold rings so, that’s gold silver and platinum.

They’re very simple and I know I sound really stingy, but ….

There’s no point. I feel like too, I’m locking up a lot of… I don’t want to lock up a lot of money in something like this that I’m never going to have access to again, right? I’d rather spend. What this means is more important than what it is. And so it could be a chisel or a burger ring, though I probably wouldn’t last very long, and that’s what it means more so and I can spend that money on other things like holidays or Aussie English or clothes or baby stuff, whatever.

I think having the baby, being pregnant and very soon having the baby is kind of… is in my mind all the time, so I’m like…

We can’t keep putting the bank to zero.

So, we spent that on the rings, we spent 400 something..

So less than 2.000 for the rings and the celebrant.

We were lucky that your parents are really generous.

My parents paid for the food and the drinks at the whiskery, but considering it was probably 20 people, each person probably had two drinks and a little bit of food. Dad probably didn’t spend over 500 bucks, maybe a bit more than 500 bucks if that.

Yeah, if that. It wasn’t an expensive place.

It wasn’t ridiculously.

Affordable.

And we didn’t have all these meals coming out. The food was finger food, so the kind of food that you can just… comes out on plates like cheese platters, pizzas and you can just take a little bit here and there, it wasn’t like a three-course meal, which was fine too because we were there for lunch and again we didn’t want to spend a shitload of money and we didn’t want.

We initially were thinking people would just buy their own food were hungry, because that’s an option too right if you guys go somewhere you can just say guys we’ll shout you the first drink or something, you know, the first drinks on us, not even that, maybe we’re keeping it small, we don’t want to spend a lot of money. So, if you guys want to buy drinks and food you know you can do that individually, totally up to you, guys, but Dad just surprised us and was like oh here’s my credit card if anyone wants to buy something go for it. Here it is.

And that’s another advantage of having such a low-key sort off party, if you have to pay for the food and drinks it’s not going to be a lot of money.

That’s the thing that can go really expensive really fast.

If you have 200 people you do not want to offer that.

100 bucks each. That’s 20 thousand dollars.

That’s 20 thousand dollars.

Yeah. So, what else? That was it.

What are the other customs? So, I had a question from I think it was Evra. I’m not sure, there was someone who asked me via email can you talk about customs in getting married so, usually the father of the bride will pay for the wedding. That’s a typical thing, although that’s not… that’s not back held to. My dad would probably tell my sister to get stuffed if she said I want a wedding with 200 people, it’s going to be fifty thousand dollars, we’re going to have horses. We’re going to have…He would be like I don’t have 50 thousand dollars to spend on you. So, typically in Western culture the dad of the bride will pay for the wedding and it’ll be… you’ll have a ceremony. If you’re religious, it’ll be at a church or a mosque or a synagogue or whatever where you get married and then you usually have the bride and groom go away with photographers for a few hours and get photos at all these different places, at wherever you guys are interested the beach, could be, you know, the stables with horses, a vineyard, the bay.

And then after that you have…sorry?

We are a really lucky couple, because it happens that your dad is a photographer, so he took all of our photos, you took really good photos of me getting ready, like friends helping out and.

We had the camera at the house whilst Kel was putting the dress on and everything, I was just like oh just taking photos.

Your photos are really, really good.

We’ll show you some, you’ll put them on the video hopefully.

We didn’t have to pay for that, but the celebrant, Wayne, was saying that a wedding of some of his friends or whatever just the photos.

Videographer, so people doing the photos and the videos is 8 thousand dollars, for one day’s work. I guess they’re doing the editing afterwards.

Yeah. But it’s just, we have other priorities, right?

Exactly. So, yeah often the bride and groom will get, their pay someone else externally to do the photos, a proper wedding photographer, so that you’ve got memories and everything and maybe videos. And then after that in the evening you usually have a reception where you receive all of the guests and they can congratulate you one on one and chat to you, you’ll have speeches where everyone…the parents of the bride and groom get up and talk and say, you know, it’s amazing to have x y z in our family and it’s such a pleasure. We hope you guys you’re an amazing couple, we’re going to have kids blah blah blah. And then the bride and groom will usually get up and say something and then you’ll have meals usually spread out so, like you’ll have one meal, speeches, another meal, speeches and then at the end after all the food and when everyone’s probably pretty drunk you’ll have the first dance so, someone to play a song, the song of the couple and they’ll have their first dance together and then usually that lasts for 30 seconds to an entire song and they’ll ask for everyone to then come on to the dance floor. And then, after the reception, everyone usually goes home, wasted. And then you’ll have a honeymoon and it can be directly after the reception where you and the fiancée, sorry, you and your wife, the wife and the groom can now go away on your honeymoon. Or it could be it… could be a period of time after the actual wedding itself, may be days or weeks later.

Yeah, I was going to say I don’t feel that in Brazil there’s a…I don’t think there’s much pressure on the father to bride to pay for the wedding. It is a convention, but I think…

That would be a Catholic thing too.

I think families are happy to share. I would expect my parents to be happy to pay for a couple things and your parents pay for other things, but not like oh yeah that’s my dad’s job to do that or like even your dad’s job, like his is a very shared sort of agreement or whatever arrangement when someone gets married that the families share the costs.

I think you could have that here too you would just have to sort of talk about it.

Yeah, it depends on the party you want to have as well, for us if we were in Brazil or your families my family was here it would be easy to do that because you always wanted like something simple and tiny, but if you have a massive party that’s much harder for people to afford.

Well, even us we’re well off, you know, standards wise, I mean upper middle class in Australia, but I can’t imagine asking my dad to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a wedding for me. It’s like one day, you know, I would feel too guilty as an Australian or a Westerner doing that. I mean and there are people who do that. We had a story at one of my friends who came to the wedding was telling us about her friend who spent a hundred and fifty thousand dollars on their wedding and her money to her husband or fiancé at that time, she got him to sell an investment property that he had, an investment property to pay for the frickin’ wedding and she didn’t even like the wedding!

Oh I would get divorced! Next day!

So, that blows my mind, spending that amount of money and it’s I think for them it’s obviously much more a status thing and showing off to everyone and making sure everyone knows that you had all this money, you don’t have it anymore.

There’s nothing, if you have the money, there’s nothing wrong with having a big party and you know.

But I think you have to sell an investment property to pay for the wedding, you don’t have the money.

If you’re rich and if you can afford that, go fo it, it’s beautiful, you have all the photos and you know videos and stuff, but for us, one, we don’t have this money, two, that’s not a priority and we’re just not one of those people, right? We kind of like simple stuff and we, you know, we don’t spend money on expensive things so, it wouldn’t be…us if we we’re going to spend a lot.

That would add another level of uncomfortableness to the experience. If it were incredibly extravagant and.

And that’s one of my favourite things about the wedding. Two things, one, everyone loved the place! It was a beautiful sunny day, which is quite lucky again because it tends to rain a lot here or be cold, but it was a beautiful sunny day. People just loved the whiskery, everyone was happy, comfortable and the thing I liked the most was that you were very comfortable. We didn’t want to have vows or, you know, I’m uncomfortable standing in front of people and saying things, English is not my first language so, I was like oh if I have to say, you know, a poem or whatever I’ll quite… I might stumble into my words, but we were really, really comfortable.

I guess too…something worth talking about or mentioning too is that Wayne, the celebrant, what happened with that is that he reads out what marriage, is what it means and the contract you’re about to enter into. And then he repeats a certain set of sentences that I have to repeat after him and then Kel has to repeat after him as well so, I do mine first like I Peter Smissen voluntarily enter into this agreement blah blah blah blah blah. And then at the end it used to be that you would one of you would say I do and the other one would say I do, but now it’s just we you do. We say we do and then at the end we put the rings on each other’s fingers so I do Kel’s finger, she does my finger, puts the ring on and then he says I now pronounce you man and wife yeah and presents us to the crowd.

Well, we had the option if we wanted we could have said something special to each other, like something that I had written or about as, our stories.

The vows. You can say like I’ll love you forever and I would cut my left arm off to be with you.

Some couples sing to each other, I thought about that and even the thought of having, saying something in Portuguese, just because, you know, people wouldn’t understand.

Eu gosto de você, cara. (Portuguese – I like you, mate)

But then I’m like I just want to get it done and then join the party, having time with people.

So, it was probably five or 10 minutes and then we we were having drinks and eating.

Absolutely.

And also to mention clothing the standard sort of thing for Western weddings. The man will have a tuxedo of some kind usually, although it can be any kind of suit really. So, what you’re comfortable with and it may go from, you know, having a tie, having a vest or a bow tie, having the jacket on pants everything like that and the woman will usually have some kind of white wedding dress and they can go… they can be incredibly extravagant all the way to pretty simple and she’ll usually have a veil on her head as well, sort of like white lace that goes over the face that he lifts up at the end to kiss her, when you kiss the bride.

I didn’t have that.

And the good thing too was Kel had a friend in Canberra that she’d met who was the same size as you and said oh you can just use my wedding dress for free. So, she had bought that wedding dress for probably two and a half to three thousand dollars and Kel to use it for free for that day. Saving a great deal of money.

It fits perfectly, everyone was saying you look really nice and I loved the photos the dress and everything. So, again, one, we were really lucky and I’m quite…you know, I really like reusing things and getting things second hand. So, when she offered I was like, you sure you want to do it? Because some people get jealous about you know their wearing dresses and stuff.

But you were just like hell yeah, I’ll use this.

I’m just like, if you’re comfortable with that, and she came to the wedding, her husband came. If it’s not awkward for you, I would love to use your dress. She was like go for it and yeah, it was perfect!

And I just had a shirt and some nice chino pants because I was like… we went shopping for me and it got pretty easy to quickly spend thousands of dollars or hundreds to thousands of dollars on a suit and Kel is like no, she wouldn’t even let me get a jacket.

People will think I control the finances.

You do to some degree, but I don’t really care enough. If I wanted it that badly I would push. So, I ended up buying a shirt, a nice shirt and some nice pants and that was all I wore. I already had some nice shoes and to be honest I got those from Target or something and they look really expensive, but they cost about 30 dollars to be honest.

Didn’t know that!

So the whole wedding I think all cost us maybe two and a bit thousand dollars.

2 grand, I would say.

That’s about it. We could have probably gone to three or four thousand if we’d had to pay for a dress as well and for all the food. Well the venue and everything else, but yeah. So, that was that was a wedding on a good budget on a good budget.

Absolutely. It was much better than I expected. It was absolutely amazing. It was as natural, quick, like…

The weather was beautiful.

It was beautiful.

We were situated under this tree that was flowering with these purple flowers that were falling on the ground, that was pretty cool.

So I’m really happy with everything, it was everything I wanted, it was really nice.

But yeah, hopefully you, guys, enjoy this episode. Hopefully there’s a lot of information in here with regards to weddings, especially obviously Australian weddings and hopefully… I would love to know what you think. I guess, that will be interesting. Do you guys want huge extravagant weddings or do you imagine having small weddings like ours that are pretty modest? You know and let us know in a comment below.

I recommend.

Make it easy for yourselves. Spend the money on something else. Buy a house, buy a car, buy a camera and go on holiday.

Have babies.

Do other things.

Exactly.

It is your day, you can do whatever you want.

I think that’s an important thing too, is that it ultimately is your day and you should definitely take control of it and say I’m going to do what I want to do, not what I think others want or not what other people want and then try to impose on you as well.

Don’t compare yourself to like…oh someone I know had this massive party. If you believe in other things like I would much rather have a small party with a tiny group of people, go for it! No one has nothing to do with it.

Anyway, thanks for joining us, guys. See you soon!

Done!

Locked in.

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Alright, guys! So, I hope you enjoyed that episode, I would love to know if you guys have gotten married or if you’re thinking of getting married. Give me your opinions. Give me your views. Tell me your experiences and what is marriage like in the country that you’re from. You know, I can imagine that it is completely different in places like Russia or China or India. So, yeah let me know what you think in a comment below. A comment on Facebook or whatever it is and I will be getting back into the routine of podcasts and videos as usual this week as usual yeah. Anyway, thanks for joining me.

Banjo is looking pretty chuffed! Look at this! You going to say goodbye? Going to say goodbye, mate! Look at that sand on your face.! You had a good time at the beach. Did you? Anyway, guys! Thanks for joining me and I’ll chat to you soon.

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