A hotel in Taiwan organized an impromptu wedding for a Slovakian couple who found themselves stranded on the island for six days and unable to get home for their own long-planned ceremony after volcanic ash closed Europe's skies.
When Juraj Hegyi, 32, and Zuzana Marcekova, 31, were spotted crying in the Orchard Park Hotel near Taiwan's main airport, the manager offered to set up a wedding on site, inviting clergy from a nearby university and packing the venue with 100 people including other stranded Europeans.
"This is not our normal line of work, but the boss here learned they were crying, that they wanted to go back urgently and had planned the wedding for more than a year," assistant hotel manager Chou Chia-hui said on Wednesday.
The couple was visiting Taiwan on a tour of Asia that had also taken them to Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand.
Some 47 passenger flights involving Taiwan's two major airlines have been cancelled since Thursday.
