Accomodation Overview

I promised to post something today to give people an idea of accommodation options. I had initially planned a single posting on this. Hopefully no one is upset that this ends up being much longer and multiple posts. Sorry in advance for being overly verbose :)

Our initial hope was that it would be reasonable to book larger group locations. However, due to the fact that it seems improbable that we'd be able to get everyone to arrive and depart on the exact times we'd prefer, we had to revisit our initial thinking. Complicating this is the fact that our own requirements are somewhat unique due to this being our wedding.

With all of that said, I'll start things off by covering a few basic items to be aware of and by describing our own requirements. So, here goes...

Things to be aware of:

• Croatia has a pretty steep VAT (22%) that gets added to pretty much everything. Some sites will advertise units with VAT added, some without, some will do both. Read the fine print
  
• Stairs are fairly common (eg: one apartment we looked into has 298 (!!) steps up) - if you don't like stairs, make sure you double check this
• Cars are not allowed to drive into the old city. As a result, transportation within is all on foot
• Prices range anywhere from about 25€ to 300€ a night
• Accommodations cover a whole range of options - this includes hostels, resorts, fancy hotels, villas, and apartments (and probably some other options I'm forgetting about)
  

Some potential places to start your search are:

• Butteryfly Services - recommended by our wedding planner, rentals are done through them, slightly more expensive
  
• Dubrovnik Apartment Source - another good looking option that has a slightly better electronic setup for booking than Butterfly does
• Dubrovnik Apartments - slightly cheaper option

The main difference between the first two and the third is that both Dubrovnik Apartment Source and Butterfly Services indicate that they have inspected the units that are available for rent through their website. Dubrovnik Apartments does not offer this guarantee, however, some of the same units show up on both, with the latter being somewhat cheaper.

Our accommodation requirements are as follows:

• relatively close to Sponza Palace to keep travel to the ceremony fairly simple as Alice will be in a wedding dress and heels
  
• not a huge number of steps to avoid having to go up and down in a dress and heels
• a relatively 'nice' unit - this is after all our wedding :)
• simple to arrange (take deposit via credit card, taxes already included, deal with a management company)
• an upper bound on cost of around 100 euro per night
  

The convenience requirement essentially limits us to either Old Town Dubrovnik or somewhere immediately outside of the city walls, preferably on the eastern side of town. We didn't have too much trouble finding something that meets the 3rd requirement, but the last one was a bit tougher with the other constraints. Of our top ten choices, only two were available for the entire time from September 19 to 24 for which we'll be in Dubrovnik.

As of now, our current plan is to stay here. It's just north of the city walls and offers quick access to the places we need to get to. It's a nice cozy bachelor apartment:



For other people, a whole variety of options are available depending on what their specific requirements are. Over the next few days, I'll post some details on the various areas in the city and I'll try to present some avenues for research for folks to get their accommodations sorted out. Please provide me some feedback with your requirements - I'll try and work that into the postings so that we can make sure that everyone gets taken care of!

Engagement Photos

We're still alive! Really! :)

Realizing that it's been quite a while since our last posting, we figured it's time for an update. More should be forthcoming over the next few days. In the meantime, I figured that I would post some details from our recent engagement photos.

In short, Alice was highly interested in getting some engagement photos done. Personally, not being the sort of person who feels himself to be terribly photogenic, and not being inclined to enjoy having photos taken of myself, a was a little bit unclear as to what the big deal was. In her attempts to convince me that this was a good thing, we'd looked at numerous examples of engagement, pre-engagement, pre-wedding, and other sorts of photos, but I just wasn't feeling it, until one day Alice discovered the idea of 'life style photos' (I realize, this sounds a bit on the pretentious side). The initial option we looked at was unfortunately a bit overpriced and underwhelming ($200 before we even get photos?!). So, what to do?

Here, the story takes a bit of an amusing turn. For those of you who are regular Facebook users, Facebook uses contextual advertising similar to what Google provides. Presumably, some of the ads that are selected for you are dependent on the various data in your Facebook user profile. What this means is that when your relationship status according to Facebook goes from 'in a relationship' to 'engaged', Facebook starts schleping all kinds of wedding related ads. Alice noticed a particular ad for wedding photographers coming up repeatedly, so she decided to check it out. From there, we met Josie and Ian (aka Pure Souls Photography). Fast forward a few weeks later and we found ourselves shooting photos in the snow and mild 'precipitation' on Mount Seymour.

Initially, given the conditions, we were very worried about the outcome. Happy to say, after seeing the end result, we're quite happy with the end product. Here's a few samples for your perusal.









For anyone interested in seeing a few more of the photos, you can go here

Invitations ahoy!

We mailed out the majority of the non-local invitations last Tuesday. Hopefully for those of you who are in Canada they start to show up in the mail in the near future. We'd love to hear from you when they arrive! Opinions of the invitations are welcome :)

For the rest of you (everyone in Vancouver), we've started to slowly make the rounds of the town to hand deliver invitations to people and be generally sociable. Remember - we'll be coming soon to a neighbourhood near you!

Despite being quiet for a few weeks, we also took the time to make a few smallish updates to the website.

About us
Wedding party

TTFN.

Invitations on the way!

We are in the process of completing the invitations and hopefully to send them out by the end of March.  Please update us your address if there is any change.  The invitation will come with a main invite, an RSVP card with menu choices, a return envelop, and a map.

Basically, we are providing three main choices of menu, in case of any dietary restriction.  We will post the menu details as soon as we get them from the vendor.

We are hoping to collect all RSVPs back by May 31 so we can finalize the details and confirm with all the vendors (wedding planner, co-ordinator, restaurant, cake, wedding favours, decorations, seating arrangment...etc). 

Vaccinations!

After some talk with my sister, I figured it might be useful to give people an idea about vaccinations, just in case they'd forgotten.

For those interested, a bit of Googling indicates that recommended vaccinations for Croatia are:

* Hepatitis A & B
* Measles, mumps, rubella (MMR)
* Tetanus-diphtheria

* Typhoid (if you plan on consuming food in randomish places)
* Rabies (if you plan on spending a lot of time outdoors)

Most people generally have vaccinations for MMR and Tetanus-Diptheria as children, so they're likely not a requirement. Hep A/B vaccinations are pretty standard if you're going outside of common western countries (eg: they're even recommended if you're going to Spain or Russia but not for UK or Italy).

For those in Vancouver, there's a pretty decent travel clinic at Broadway and Ash where we got all vaccinated up before we went to Taiwan. For a fee, they'll have a chat with you and give you some recommendations on what you'd want and then they'll do it up. In general, for vaccinations, you can probably get away with leaving them until 4-6 weeks before you travel.

UPDATE: I stand corrected on the tetanus part - tetanus apparently has to be re-done approximately once every 10 years.

The best gifts...

Normally people would set up a gift registry, in our case, the gift registry is the guest list.  We are not expecting any gifts, your attendance will be the best gift for us.

To be practical, it would be a lot of trouble for one to bring a gift to Croatia.  Then we will have pack the gift in a suit case and travel around Europe with it.  Not super optimal, especially when the luggage allowance is very low.  Michael and I think gifts are not the best idea.  But if anyone insists, we would accept anything that's we can easily stuff into Michael's pocket, like a greeting card.  I especially like handmade cards. :P

Cheap Plane Tickets

If you are still looking for plane tickets, our friend Stephanie, who always have tones of travel tips, she just forwarded me an article about a budget airline based in German called Condor.

Condor offers very good deals from a few Canadian cities to Frankfurt. Here are some example of cheap tickets I found on their website:

Vancouver - Frankfurt round trip Sept 17-Sept 24 for $1150 USD
Halifax - Frankfurt round trip Sept 16 - Sept 26 for $891 USD

There are a few things to be awared of when booking with budget airline:
-look into their luggage limitation
-purchase trip interruption insurance (most of time it should be covered by your credit card)
-make sure you always give yourself lots of extra time to connect flights.