New! Did you see dlogbook?
Our wedding reception was held in the Raffles Suite at London Zoo. If you've been to the zoo and used the café in recent years, you might have sat in part of this suite, as they now use it for overflow seating for the café during the day!
The reception started with us cutting our cake - a delicious chocolate cake from Patisserie Valerie in Soho.
After this, the caterers prepared a barbecue, which was eaten at tables with animal-print tablecloths (provided by the zoo) and lots of other exciting things (provided by us)! The excitement included personalised place mats (much better than the usual place names!), 
animal table decorations (mainly wooden giraffes with numbers sticking up from their heads to indicate which table was which) and a sheet of zoolyweds puzzles, supplied for each guest along with an animal-print pencil (and a blue or purple heart-shaped pencil-sharpener for each table!).
The meal was followed by speeches and toasts, before we tried hard not to reveal that we couldn't actually dance in our first dance.
Most of the rest of the evening was spent socialising and generally having a good time, aided by the finest selection of animal-related boxed games our money could buy! These games included:
- African Animals playing cards
- Doh Nutters
- Hungry Hippos
- Penguin Pile-Up
- Rumble In The Jungle
- Tumblin' Monkeys
- Wild Animalopoly
- a zoo jigsaw puzzle
A quality selection, I'm sure you agree!
We were also meaning to put out dlogbook, a special printed version of our dlog, on one of the tables, for people to peruse and comment on in the lined spaces provided, or just to write messages to us in on the lined pages at the back. Very unfortunately, however, we forgot to get this out of our suitcase :( We passed it round the coach on the way home but if you missed this and would like to see it, do ask when you're next visiting us and we'll gladly take it out to show you - everyone who sees it makes the otherwise wasted hours put into producing it more worthwhile!
The games broke off at one point, for a quality stand-up comedy routine from Fred Crawley, recently returned from his successful show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival!
And of course, there was plenty of music throughout the evening, and we were delighted by how many people joined in the dancing in the last hour of the evening!
There were also some interesting impromptu scientific experiments carried out by some of the guests, most notably an attempt to lift an empty beer bottle off the floor using the power of helium zoolyweds balloons. Unfortunately even a full complement of around 70 balloons wasn't quite enough to achieve this, even when Martin and Duncan laid down on the floor and blew the balloons upwards! Better luck next time, eh?
After our last dance, Paul spun Edith around with her eyes shut, then ducked to the floor as she threw her bouquet. Impressively enough, of all the people stood around, it was actually caught by Anna and Eoin, who are getting married next year!
A great evening all round - thanks to everyone for coming.
