Weddingbee Blog

I’ve meant to write parts of this down for a while now because I want to remember it when I’m old and gray and the details have gotten foggy in my head. Mr. Funnel Cake and I had a very lucky way of finding one another, you see…because we did not grow up in the same neighbourhood or even on the same continent.

Born and raised in Columbus, Ohio, USA, at some point I found myself finishing up a visual communication design degree. Thanks to the wonderful contacts my university’s design professors had for studying abroad, about 10 out of the 22 designers in our small department had the opportunity to spend their last autumn quarter in 2007 studying in Brazil, South Korea, Switzerland, the Netherlands, or Germany. I was deciding between Korea, which I had no opposition to choosing, and Zürich. Ultimately I decided Zürich was a “mecca of awesome design,” and I set my heart on Switzerland. Or maybe I just enjoyed my Swiss professor’s eyebrows that much? We’ll never know.

After threatening the rest of my class with the fact that I would hurt them if they tried to take the only Zürich spot from me, I was enrolled at the local design school, ZHdk. Luckily enough, though, my Swiss design professor let me know of a design internship ($$!), which I applied for and accepted. So off I went to Swiss land for the first time without a single language class in preparation. We all know the Swiss speak four languages and have their own versions at that, and only planning to spend three months there…I figured I didn’t need to bother and learn anything. Can you see me eating my words some time later?

At the same time, my classmate Laura was planning on attending a design school in Berlin. Laura is important in this story. Without Laura, there would be no Mr. Funnel Cake in my life.

Laura thought her spot in Berlin was guaranteed, but the school didn’t secure a position for her, so midsummer in 2007 she was searching like crazy all over Germany to find a school so she could still study abroad. She ended up finding a school in Würzburg that nobody else was studying at and was still able to go traveling around Europe for one month with some other design friends before starting school in October. (Lazy Germans—my Swiss internship started in early September! But that’s another point…) So Laura left in late August to start a month-long travel adventure.

Now Mr. Funnel Cake is a true-blue Swiss guy. OK, and Brazilian too, but he was born and raised in Switzerland. In August 2007, Mr. Funnel Cake had a break in his studies. He had applied for a military course, which he wasn’t accepted to, so the poor guy eased his rejection by taking a sailing trip in Greece to occupy his time. We should feel bad for him, shouldn’t we?

Now, Mr. Funnel Cake is a bit of a loner…and he happened to be staying at a hostel by himself. At dinnertime one evening he wandered into the lobby to look for someone to eat with, when he met…Laura! She happened to be in the Greece leg of her travels, and while she didn’t need dinner companions because of her design friends, she found out Mr. Funnel Cake was from Zürich, so she wrote his email down because she knew I was studying in Zürich.

After a few weeks more of traveling, Laura gave me Mr. Funnel Cake’s email address, and I wrote my first email to him, which went something along the lines of:

Hello Mr. Funnel Cake!

I heard you met my friend Laura in Athens awhile ago. I am another design student from Ohio State University, and I’m working at an internship in Zurich right now. I just wanted to say hello since she said you are also in Switzerland.

-Katie

…OK, in reality this email is word for word except for names. (More on that later.) I can’t believe I wrote him an email that just said hello and nothing more, really. But there you have it…that is how the first contact started between Mr. Funnel Cake and me. And so ends Part 1 of my story.