Weddingbee Blog

In Part I, I made the first contact with Mr. Funnel Cake while I was living in Zürich, writing an email saying hello.

How did Mr. Funnel Cake respond? You guessed it. He was very friendly. He welcomed me to Switzerland and said he would be glad to make my stay as comfortable as possible, and that if I needed anything I should just ask. The definition of a gentleman, if you will…and I hadn’t even met the guy.

He seemed tame enough, so I wrote him back and asked if he knew of any good places around the city to see or authentic Swiss food to eat, or if he would want to meet for a drink and give me clues about what’s fun. (Kind of promiscuous coming from a twenty-year-old who wasn’t old enough to drink in her own country yet!) After writing back and forth a few more times, Mr. Funnel Cake asked me to come up with a time and place for something I wanted to see and he would do his best to show me around.

After I failed to write back for a little more than a week, Mr. Funnel Cake wrote me again and asked me “to excuse that he had the cheek to do so.” Oh boy. He sounded sincere, this one. He wanted to know if I was still interested in meeting and said he hoped to hear from me soon. I wrote him back telling him I was busy at work and that I was planning a weekend trip (escape) to Darmstadt, Germany, but that I would be free the next weekend and would maybe have some design girls visiting me and that they would probably like to meet a local as well. I gave him a list of things we could visit or do, and he replied that he could think of worse ways to spend the weekend than a city tour with a bunch of girls.

He gave me his number (step one of ??? complete), and we planned to meet on the following Sunday. I told him that someone told me to try some world-famous müesli from Cafe Sprüngli, and he admitted that he had never been there…but that there is a first time for everything. It seems there were a fair amount of places left in Switzerland that Mr. Funnel Cake had not explored yet before I arrived.

The design girls couldn’t visit me that Sunday, so it turned out that I was venturing out all alone to meet this strange man. We happened to be meeting on the weekend of daylight savings, and Mr. Funnel Cake was so considerate to text me in the morning to remind me that the clocks were set back an hour. (How sweet!)

On my way to meet Mr. Funnel Cake, I realised that I was basically heading out for a blind date, something I hadn’t really been preparing to do in Zürich. We had given each other descriptions of each other, and as I rode the bus from my rotary house the short distance to the botanical gardens where we were meeting, I just kept thinking, “Man, I hope he’s not weird.”

But as I stepped off the bus into the bright sunny day toward a tall man with dark blond hair and blue eyes, I just had one thought: “Ohh, he’s cute!”

…That was October 28, 2007. I didn’t realise exactly what day it was until now because at the time it just seemed like a normal encounter with a normal person. But now, it makes our wedding date, October 29, seem a little more special because it is practically on the four-year mark of meeting for the first time.