Wedding Date on Aug 3, 2018

When Matt and I got engaged in Cancun, Mexico) it ignited my dream of having a destination wedding. We are a multicultural couple who easily belong everywhere in the world. I’m a blond, blue-eyed Lebanese who was born and brought up in the U.S. but spent every summer, Lebanon. Matt, Ben Affleck look-alike, was also born in the U.S. to Australian parents. He grew up in many countries around the world, including Japan, Singapore, Bahrain and Philippians. Cancun seemed to be the logical place for my dream wedding. However, after staring the planning process, the Zika scare made many of my friends and family scared to travel to Mexico. We went back to the drawing board and picked South Beach, Miami. Matt and I made two trips there and narrowed the choice to two venues. My parents and scheduled a trip there to finalize a contract, but Hurricane Matthew changed our plans—our flights were cancelled. My mom was convinced this was a sign and we needed a new spot. I gave up on wedding planning! Finally, my future father-in-law, David, made a statement in exasperation, “A destination wedding has to be Beirut or Bali.” He lives in Jakarta and spends many holidays in Bali. Truth be told, my brother and his beautiful wife had had a dream wedding in Lebanon three years earlier and as far as weddings go, Lebanon is hard to match, but we took the challenge. I knew Matt and David would do everything possible to make my vision of a picture-perfect wedding come true. I counted on them to do all the research from interviewing wedding planners to searching for venues. You could say our wedding was planned by the groom and his father! I went to Bali twice to do all the planning: once with Matt and once with my parents who had honeymooned in Bali 35 years earlier. (Talk about signs!) Planning a wedding halfway around the world with busy work schedules added a layer of complexity. Different time zones, languages, and cultural differences about the meaning of urgent, ensured there was never a dull moment. Luckily, we had picked a great wedding planning company and our vision was becoming a reality. More than anything else, technology made our wedding feasible—invitations, napkins, flowers, chairs, menus, and so many other things were selected in skype meetings. Matt and I coordinated flights, hotels, airport transportation and activities. We were determined to make everyone have a unique and fun experience. Being avid travelers, we taught our guests the tips and tricks for booking flights and hotels, what bring on your travels and what to avoid eating. We built out an elaborate and detailed website for our guests. It included information on hotels, flights, visas, restaurants and touristic attractions both in Bali and along the way. We would have never guessed that 80 people from around the world would join us in Bali for the adventure of a lifetime. For some, it was the first time they traveled outside of the U. S. Incredibly, no one had any mishaps along the way but we had to navigate between three earthquakes, one before and two a few days after the wedding. We curated every detail of our friends and family trip with coordinating airport transportation, Bali themed welcome bags, sunset drinks on the beach, island hopping on a catamaran, private tours of the monkey forest and rice paddies in Ubud. Two nights before the wedding we held an elaborate welcome dinner at Opia. Many of our guests thought the event would have more than qualified as the wedding. Little did they know what was to come!