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Pippa and Beth share real stories about family. Pippa goes to a wedding where there are lots of brides around, and Beth flies to the USA to meet long lost family. 

Transcript

Beth
Hello. Welcome to the Learning English Stories podcast. I'm Beth and today we are telling more of our own true stories. Pippa's joining me and we're going to be talking about family reunions. Hello, Pippa.

Pippa
Hi. How are you?

Beth
I'm good. Thank you. How are you?

Pippa
I'm good. Yeah.

Beth
Good. Did you see your family this weekend?

Pippa
I did see my family this weekend. I saw my sister, which was exciting. I haven't seen her for a few months, so that was really nice.

Beth
It's almost a reunion.

Pippa
Mm.

Beth
So, a reunion is when you see people you haven't seen for a long time, or maybe somebody that you've never met but that you're related to.

Pippa
So, Beth we're talking about family today. Do you have a big family?

Beth
I don't have a big family. I have a really small family, although I'm going to tell you a story and it turns out I kind of do have a big family.

Pippa
Oh, that's exciting. I'm looking forward to hearing about it.

Beth
OK, then. Pippa, we are going to start with your story.

So, my story is all about a wedding. So a couple of years ago, my brother and his girlfriend found out that they were having a baby. And that was really exciting. It was my first time being an aunt, so I was really excited about it. But my brother lives in Sweden, so one of the first things that we needed to figure out was when are we going to see this new baby? We didn't want to book too early because maybe the baby would come late. Maybe they wouldn't want us turning up just as they had a really small, screaming newborn baby.

Beth
Fair enough.

Pippa
So we decided to go in October, when my niece would be about six weeks old and my parents decided they'd come at the same time and everything was booked. And then my brother rang me and he said, actually, we've decided we're going to get married when you come to stay. So that was really exciting. And they didn't really want a big wedding, so they'd booked to get married in the City Hall in Stockholm whilst we were all visiting to meet the new baby.

My niece arrived safely and we all headed out to meet her and for this new wedding – a really bright and sunny day in Sweden, which is quite rare in October. So we arrived at the venue, which was a really nice old building with a courtyard, and it was right by the water so you could walk down, and it was really beautiful, but it was also absolutely filled with brides.

Beth
Oh, what?

Pippa
Yes. So, it turns out they do weddings all day, every Saturday. It's really popular for people to get married at the City Hall, and it's quite cheap and it's a really pretty building so it's really popular with people. And so there were genuinely 20, 30 different couples walking around. So we were waiting outside to go in, and it was really strange watching all these couples have their photo shoots around us. I'd never experienced anything quite like it.

We went into the hall and we waited for the ceremony, and when we got inside, the wedding lasted about five minutes – it was really, really quick and my niece slept the whole way through, which was lovely. It was a really fun day. We went for a really nice lunch to celebrate afterwards. Yeah, it was a very memorable wedding and family reunion. And I met my new niece.

Beth
Oh. How old was your niece at this wedding?

Pippa
I think maybe about six weeks old. Seven weeks? Um, yeah. She. She was very quiet during the wedding. She cried a lot later in the day.

Beth
OK.

Pippa
But it was good fun.

Beth
But that feels crazy to have a baby. And then six weeks later, get married.

Pippa
Yeah. I think when they booked it, they maybe hadn't thought too much about that because they hadn't had the baby yet when they booked the wedding. But I think they were like, we, you know, we're having this baby. We want to get married. They have half their family in Sweden, half are in the UK, so they knew they didn't really want to do a big wedding and make half of their family kind of come to one country or the other. So yeah, they just did a small thing.

Beth
When you were traveling anyway...

Pippa
Yeah.

Beth
Killing two birds with one stone...

Pippa
Exactly. Saved me some money on a couple of flights.

Beth
That's true.

Pippa
OK, Beth, it's time to hear a story from you. Tell me all about your big family reunion.

Beth
Yeah. So, as I said, my family is very small. I have one aunty. I have one cousin. But my mum decided to look at our family tree. She started researching, and she was looking at all these birth records and death records and wedding certificates, and she discovered that her great grandmother on my granny's side had five siblings.

Pippa
Wow.

Beth
And they were all adopted to the USA, apart from one of them. So suddenly we discovered that, obviously a few generations back, but there was five sort of branches of our family in the United States. So because only one sibling had stayed in the UK, that's kind of why we have such a small family. So they were adopted in the late 1800s, and obviously since then they have had children and more children and grandchildren and great grandchildren.

And my mum decided, well why not? I'm going to contact some of them. So she was emailing people and basically we found loads of these people and we decided to go over to the USA, and people from different parts of the States all flew and came together in, I think it was South Carolina, and we had a big family reunion.

So we were in my, a cousin's house, obviously a very distant cousin. They made us feel really welcome. I was eight at the time, so I was just a child with these American children having a great time who I was kind of related to. And yeah, loads and loads of people. And apparently we're related to them. So, since then, lots of them have come over to visit the UK, and they've stayed with us. I went travelling and I stayed with one of them, when I was traveling. So yeah, it's great. We've got all these relations now that we don't really see or talk to very often, but we know they exist. So it turns out my family is a bit bigger than I thought.

Pippa
Amazing. And did any of the relatives in the US did they know about each other or everybody kind of had a reunion at the same time?

Beth
Yeah, so they knew of each other, but they had no idea about the adoption and that there was basically a British branch of the family in the UK, so they were really surprised to know about that because they were all adopted when they were babies, children. They had no idea.

Pippa
That's so cool and nice to have family around the world.

Beth
Yeah.

Pippa
Especially if you're travelling.

Beth
Exactly. It was very handy.

What is your family like? Have you ever had a big reunion? Send us an email and tell us about your story. Our email address is [email protected]. We would love to hear from you.

Pippa
That's it for this episode. Next time we'll be hearing some more stories from Georgie and Neil. Bye for now.

Beth
Goodbye.

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