Your Wedding Has Nothing on These Strange Weddings from Around the World.

Weddings are often the most important day of our lives. The preparation and planning all (hopefully) amounts to a wonderful day. Yet it’s an occasion that affords few surprises.

If you want to go a little nuts and throw a wedding that your friends won’t expect, take a page out of these extreme weddings from around the world. Your guests will thank you for the laughs.

1.) Polterabend- Smashing Dishes: Germany

Monkeys and Mountains

From sawing logs to breaking plates, those German couples sure know how to throw a weird wedding.

2.) Shooting The Bride: China

All That Is Interesting

In China, grooms shoot their brides with three (blunted) arrows and then break them. We’re not sure why.

3.) Kidnapping the Brides: Romani

List Dose

If you manage to convincingly or forcefully kidnap a girl and have her by your side for at least 2 to 3 days, she will officially be declared your wife.

4.) Blackening the Bride: Scotland

Balintore Holiday

Being tied to a tree, taken drinking, and having rancid trash and goo poured over you are just some of the things a bride needs to endure to prove her love.

5.) Marrying a Tree: India

Oddee

Born when Mars and Saturn are both under the 7th house, a woman wanting to break an imposed curse must marry a tree, and then chop it down.

6.) Beating the groom’s feet: Korea

List Dose

Korean tradition dictates that the groom has his feet beaten with fish or a cane before his first night as a married man.

7.) Cross-dressing: Russia

A Travelers Journey

Russian couples still believe in dowrys. However, if the dowry is considered to be insufficient, a substitute bride will be presented (this could well be a cross dressing friend) until more money is handed over and unless the groom is happy with the substitute.

8.) Délicieux Toilette La Soupe: France

Huffington Post

After a wedding ceremony is over in France, the bridal party will collect leftovers, bits of trash, and anything else they deem to be sufficiently gross within a toilet bowl and barge into the couple’s room. They will not leave until the couple drink it. Even though this is sometimes substituted with chocolate, they’re still eating straight from the toilet.

9.) Shaved brides: China

A Travelers Journey

A married woman in China is supposed to shave off all but a lock of her hair, as it is considered as sign of beauty and cleanliness.

10.) Spitting on the Bride: Massai nation, Kenya

Mr. Brodericks

At a Massai wedding, the father of the bride blesses his daughter by spitting on her head and breasts. He does not look back as she walks out of the village for fear of turning into stone.

11.) Croquembouche Sky High Cake: France

Flickr

French weddings often serve a croquembouche, a truly delightfully tower of cream-filled pastry puffed that can be dipped in any number of sweet sauces.