A Destination Wedding?!

My beautiful ring.

Since we got engaged on Christmas day we had begun thinking about wedding details. There were two things that we both knew. The first was that we didn't want a long engagement and secondly we didn't want to spend a lot of money on a wedding. I understand why some people like to spend crazy amounts of money on a wedding but for us, our life together is much more important and at the end of the day, it's just one day out of your entire life!

My family <3

So initially we thought that we would do a small legal ceremony in Ireland and then a year later when we arrived in America we would have a backyard wedding in Jasons sisters garden. This is what we told people and all of our Irish friends and family were beginning to plan their trips to America. Once we got back to Korea after our holiday in Ireland we started looking in to it a lot more. We found that the little ceremony in Ireland would cost about $3,000 alone and then the more we looked in to having a backyard wedding we realised that we wouldn't be able to do it for less than $10,000. This scared the crap out of both of us! Neither of us would want to begin our life in America together with no savings. So we began to get stressed, really stressed! Until one day we finally made the decision that seemed to fit us so perfectly but had never realised...a destination wedding!

Initially we considered going to the Maldives just the two of us, but after researching places to stay, it would have still cost us about $10,000 for a week there. So we started to look at South East Asia, an area that we both love. We had researched Bali (they have amazing places to stay for very cheap), Philippines (direct flights from Korea, it's a country I've always wanted to see and beautiful beaches), Borneo (our first holiday together was here and it's a place that we both LOVE!) and we even got in contact with a hotel in Burma!

Finally we chose the destination...The Philippines!
We chose it because Jason has been before and absolutely loved it there, I've always wanted to go and well, there are 1,000's of beaches to choose from! Once we had decided on the country, we began looking at places within the country. Now as some of you may know the Philippines is HUGE! I think ideally we would have chosen a place that was off of the tourist trail but once we told a few friends they had told us that they wanted to come. Our wonderful friend from Mark Jones photography also offered his services for our photos so we had to think about what would be easiest for people to get to and the funny thing is that we chose the most touristy island of The Philippines…Boracay!


Once we knew where we wanted to get married we then had to try to find a resort. This involved me scouring the internet and sending e-mails to many places. We couldn't find anywhere that was just right until one day I had given up hope and decided to go on google maps and search Boracay. Google maps has pins of some hotels on it so I went through the whole island until I found one resort that I hadn't heard of before, Asya Premier Suites. After searching it online I immediately fell in love with it, I showed it to Jason and he did too. At that point we knew that this was the place!

The pool at Asya 

A photo from one of their weddings.

And again.

So I sent them a message and got no reply, sent another one and still no reply. Normally I'd have given up but this was THE place! So I sent a bit of a snarky message the third time and I got a reply. We found out all of the information and found that it was indeed perfect for us!
We have now sent in our deposit and officially booked our date. We'll be having our wedding on January 6th and can't wait!
I'm sure that you'll probably be hearing more about it as the date gets nearer :)

Here are some engagement photos that our wonderful friends Mark and Ian from Wooly & Jones photography took for us. They are extremely talented and are based  here in South Korea. They will also be shooting for our wedding so we are unbelievably excited for that!