Akseli's birthday and a finnish wedding

Saturday was a huge day! It started off at 8am with chocolate and cake. My host family is on a 'candy diet' and haven't eaten candies for over a year! On saturday it was Akseli's 10th birthday and the 'candy diet' was put on pause. We had candies galore!

The birthday boy... As you can see the table was full of cake, croissants, a whole plate with 5 different types of chocolate and tea :)

The cake Selma made for Akseli :)

After breakfast we all quickly got dressed and hurried off to a finnish wedding in Tampere. Tampere is a 2 hour drive north from our house. Everyone there was ice hockey crazy and I quickly learnt Tampere is home to two major ice hockey teams. 

In the car...

The church the wedding was in, was amazing! It was built in 1880 and was huge! It had a massive organ and beautiful lights hanging from the celling. 

They even sung finnish hymns... I took this just for you grandpa ;)

The couple getting married. I found it quite weird and funny meeting them for the first time at their wedding. 

When the newly weds were walking out of the church they gave us horns to blow at them. Of course being Finland they even had angry bird horns! Akseli and I had a horn blowing competition all the way to the reception.

The newly weds driving off to the reception... start saving dad, I found a car I like ;)

At the reception there was many wedding speeches. It was really awkward when everyone was crying and i'm just nodding and smiling thinking I have no idea what you are saying as they were all in finnish. It was also very exhausting trying to interperet what the older finnish people were saying when they talked to me as they didnt speak very good english. 

Gorgeous table decorations...

For those of you who know me, I always make serviette flowers. So I taught my whole table how to make serviette flowers. To all the finnish people at the wedding I was known as 'the Australian girl who makes pretty serviette flowers'. 

On the way home my host dad stopped at a castle! It was huge and really unique as we have no castles in Australia. There is only about 4 castles left in Finland as most of them are made of wood and burnt down in WWII.