Love in Lviv: wedding addition

First theme-of-the-day: marriage!  The first day I arrived in Lviv and toured around the city, I noticed that everywhere I turned I saw girls dressed up in white toting men in tuxes.  I don't know if they were taking wedding photos or actually got married that day (or both), but they were everywhere!  Lviv is a beautiful city, so I would expect a lot of young Ukrainians to get married here.  The one problem was was that they all looked so young, like 15 years young.  A friend of mine later told me that women in Ukraine tend to get married around the age of 18 and usually to older men.  Naturally, I looked it up and found that the average age to get married is 25.9 for men and 23.1 for women (compared to 28.4 for men and 26.5 for women in the United States).  Maybe this past Saturday just tended to be a younger crowd.  Either that or Ukrainian women just tend to look younger.  Check it out for yourself:

20 year old?

can't see her face in the photo but she looked about 17

traditional ukrainian "vyshivky"

ummm 15?

girl= 17.  man= at least 25?

hmm maybe this one is about 23

and this lady tended to look a bit older, i guess.  and that dude in the background was totally lovin all the camera time.

creeper shot

biiiiig dress

really love to top of this dress :)

Being Ukrainian, I'm sad to admit I don't know fo many of the wedding traditions.  However, I'll be sure to ask my grandma and report back!  I do know that many of the customs are similar to American ones, and that holding a bouquet with even number of flowers is bad luck!  And, just like Americans, the divorse rate among Ukrainians is about 49%.  In some parts of Ukraine the "unofficial"divorse rate was even as high as 98%.  It has been said that the economic situations tend to get too stressful.... or something like that.  I definately wouldn't move to those areas as a young couple.