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BUDD and EVELYN'S WEDDING
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ERIC May 2004, from Mandaue City
My experience of
getting married in the Philippines.
First advice: Bring as
many official papers as you can possibly think
of!
I am a Dutch citizen and
my embassy stated on their highly informative
website that a birth certificate and a paper
stating your status (single, divorced, etc)
would do the trick. I brought those two papers
to the Dutch consulate here in Cebu and after
two weeks I got my “Legal Capacity for
Marriage” a paper that says there are no legal
barriers for me to get married.
The common thing here is
to marry in a church but when we talked to a
priest of a local church they demanded more
papers. (My embassy did not tell me about
that!) I think the church wanted some
baptismal papers which I did not have and
probably would take very long to get. I am a
Catholic but didn’t go in a church since I was
10 or so. I emailed the office of the Bishop
of the place I was born but never got a reply.
I got a bit pissed off as I thought that God
(if he exists) would not be such a bureaucrat
and would welcome everyone who wanted to marry
in his church. But I was relieved too because
I did not want to get married in a church but
on a nice tropical beach. My future wife
agreed on this as she could clearly see that I
was not really welcome in the Catholic church
of the Philippines.
So when we went to the
city hall of Mandaue (because we live in
Mandaue not in Cebu) for a civil wedding but
they told me they needed my divorce papers as
well. (Not mentioned on the embassy web site)
I had some fax copies of those papers but only
in Dutch. They told us we could not get
married in Mandaue without those papers but
advised us to go to the province
administration of Cebu as they are less
strict. So we went to the Capitol (the name of
the provincial offices here).
You really need some
help with this preferably from someone with
some experience in governmental
administration. In our case a councilor of a
barangay in Mandaue helped us through the
whole process. This councilor is a friend of
the sister of my wife. Not only did he help us
with the paperwork but he is now also one of
our ‘Ninongs’, a godfather and/or witness on
the wedding.
Your future wife will
probably know someone who can help you getting
papers arranged. If you really don’t know
anyone you could probably ask the barangay
captain of the barangay where you future wife
grew up. Or hire a lawyer as an alternative.
Our Ninong talked to the
assistant of a Judge who has his court in the
Capitol building so I guess it was a
provincial court. My passport together with
the embassy supplied Legal Capacity was enough
for the court. My wife needed also some papers
like a birth certificate and a paper stating
her status. These papers are not so hard to
get but they take a few weeks as everything is
this country seems to be handled in Manila. We
agreed on a wedding date a few weeks further,
filled in some papers and paid about 16,000
peso. This is much more as a Pinoy would have
to pay but the Judge would come to the beach
to marry us there and wanted to bring some
body guards with him! Later it turned out we
had another Judge; a nice lady without body
guards.
That was all it took to
get all the paperwork done.
Now that we had a fixed
date for our wedding we could start planning
the actual event. We went to one of the beach
resorts here in Cebu called Maribago Blue
Water. This is a very nice upscale resort
located on Mactan Island 20 minutes from Cebu
city. Maribago has a wedding package costing
75,000 peso including dinner for 100 guests,
Wedding Cake, two white doves, friendly
waiters and waitresses, some flower
decorations and one night stay in the resort
for the couple.
One of the many
interesting customs here is that you have to
supply the clothes of the parents of the bride
together with the dresses of the bride maids.
I wanted to make our wedding look like it was
really a wedding in the Philippines (tropical)
and not like one set in the USA. (Most
weddings you see here are clones of US
weddings including the awful shiny dresses in
rose, mint green of other too-sweet-colors) I
hope you will agree that we succeeded in that
(see link for pictures below)
I found a designer who
would create a nice wedding gown, the dresses
for my mother and mother-in-law, a nice outfit
for me and the dresses of the brides maids (4
girls), flower kids (3 girls & 3 boys). All in
all I paid 37,000 peso for 14 outfits. The
designer did a wonderful job and fulfilled my
request to make the dresses look a bit local.
He used some nice fabric from Mindanao which
had a definite local look. Also the dress of
my wife was made out of two pieces; underneath
the normal gown she was wearing an extra,
tight dress made of the same fabric so she
could dance on our wedding party.
We hired a photographer
from Cebu for our pictures but she also did
the flower decorations (in excess of what the
resort already did), the make-up of the brides
maids, mothers and of course the bride. The
photographer charged 19,000 including about
150 prints of the excellent pictures, a poster
size enlargement and a video cd of the
wedding. They came with 3 to do the pictures
and video. She also turned out to be sort of a
director for the whole event; telling everyone
where to go and what to do. We forgot to get a
ceremonial master for the event but she took
up that roll without a problem.
We also hired a local
band that I saw performing a few times before.
The cost for that was 7000 peso including the
all the equipment and transportation. The
resort surprised us with five nicely dressed
up acoustic guitar players singing local and
Spanish songs. Very romantic!
The wedding location
itself was a tiny sandbank in front of - and
part of - the resort. The resort staff did an
excellent job. They put up some huge tent like
structures providing shade and nicely
decorated the tables and chairs on the beach.
The food was near perfect and plenty. The
wedding, dinner and party started at 3 PM and
lasted until 8 PM.
Our wedding was a great
success and all our guests, pinoys and
foreigners alike enjoyed it as much as we did. It was a bit expensive according to local
standards but I wanted it to be better then my
first wedding back in the Netherlands.The photographer is GCJ
Video
The designer is Ivan.
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