I've been off the blogging radar for a while as my Mother came over to visit to kindly help me go wedding dress shopping. This is not an easy feat here when 80% of the shops didn't speak english (and my German is admittedly pretty bad), customer service is usually average and what is in style here, was in style everywhere else in the 90's.
What I found most intriguing was that wedding dress shops here all have yellow interiors. Walls are painted yellow, floors are often yellowy wooden and even the lighting has this yellowish glow. I'm not quite sure what they are trying to achieve. I thought maybe it makes you look more tan if you try on a bright white dress, or it has slimming properties… but neither of these seemed to work for my pasty skin and newly chubby figure (thanks to german salami, wurst, cheese and chocolate).
Returning to my point above, customer service here has never had a good reputation. I read about it before I arrived, I've experienced it whilst living here, and most of the time just put up with it. Its like they are stuck in the 50's when products were gleaning things that all consumers want - and if you don't want to buy the thing the sales person tells you to buy, you can just piss off.
Wedding dress shopping was no exception. To be fair, most of the time the ladies were lovely, understanding with my slow broken german and friendly towards helping us find a dress. On other occasions, sales ladies were slightly more bitter and less willing to help if we didn't like the first dress they pulled out as a suggestion. But I did have to mention here my favourite low point was when we emailed one shop to make and appointment with them. My man wrote the email in german to them saying nicely that I found some dresses on their website and would like to make an appointment to try some on. Also, I don't speak very much german and my mother joining me doesn't speak any. They responded a few days later - directly translated "All our discussions are conducted in German, so you should brides who do not speak the German language, make an appointment elsewhere. For this reason, we cannot make an appointment with you"
There was no polite "could you bring a translator" or "we'd be happy to try with the little german you speak although none of us speak english" … but no, please take your business elsewhere (even though in the other 80% of wedding shops we went to I managed fine to communicate only in german).
Surprisingly and luckily, we found my wedding dress a few days later (also at a shop that only spoke German but were more than happy to do business with me). We decided to ring around just to check prices before purchase. We rang the shop with the terrible customer service to compare prices, and the same dress to purchase from them was 500euros more. Double glad they didn't get our business now.
Seeing I can't exactly put photos up of my dress, here are a couple of photos from my mums visit that she took whilst we were traipsing around looking for the dress.
(Also, a special shout out to my mum, thanks for coming to help me buy a dress! Couldn't have done it without you!)
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