Wedding Registry

We weren't able to set up a Wedding Registry in the US because I knew I wouldn't be able to take gifts with me back to Germany... but here in Germany, Robin and I are able to set up a registry. It is a little different though. We are setting up two registries - one in a store and one online. At the store it is called a Hochzeitstisch or Wedding Table. It is literally a table that will be set up with all the gifts we are registering for. For guests to buy something from this registry, they can only go to the store we registered at, none of the other branches of the store will have any record of what we have registered for. We also set up an appointment for our registery time - June 14th, not before.

Today we were able to start our registry. What a HUGE task!!! We were there almost 4 hours and aren't even finished yet. Most people here live together and start their household before they get married. Robin and I aren't doing it this way. These couples already have many of the things they need to start their home, so they don't need to register for too many things. We don't have all those things because we haven't lived together... this led to some interesting situations in the store:

Robin and I were talking about pots. We weren't sure what sizes we would need, so we discussed it. There happened to be a man standing next to us. Robin was saying something like "Well, we haven't lived together, so I'm not sure we know exactly what we will need". The man turned and looked at us like we were from Mars. I think he understood enough English to know what we were saying. He seemed VERY surprised to hear such a statement.

The other situation - we took our first load upstairs to where they set up the tables. The two employees there looked at everything and asked if we expected lots of family at the wedding (or people who would buy gifts).... All of the other tables there were not nearly so full. What can I say? We need a lot of things to start our house. Between the two of us, we don't have much.

We also thought setting up a registry online might also be an interesting idea. We decided to register on http://www.wunsch-galerie.de/. It links to several stores, including Amazon.de (all in German). The idea is that our guests could also go there to purchase something for us. I haven't seen anything like this before, so we will see how it works.