Bliss Blog’s Birthday: {v. 2.0 Launched!}

After months of tweaking and refining, Bliss is proud to unveil our newly overhauled, custom-designed Blogsite! We are ecstatic and hope that you will enjoy some of the rad features, including our Sneak Peek section {for anyone too busy to read an entire post} and a more user-friendly comments section complete with all the social networking you could ever want. What we like best of all is that finally, we can veer away from templates and let our personalities and creativity shine through {not that there’s anything wrong with templates… Net Rivet, you rocked. But being in an artistic industry, we have to continue to push the limits as best we can to remain distinct}.

A huge shout-out to our friends at Flosites {Ross and Dimi, you guys have been phenomenal!} for bridging geographical boundaries and time-zones and working with us from all the way on the other side of the globe {little country called Moldova…ever heard of it?!}.  Flosites worked alongside our local branding experts at Eleven-Seventeen {shout-out to Krista + Dan for helping us better understand who we really are!} and together they pushed us to think differently and yet be true to ourselves. The marvels of modern technology really came through for us, as things became interesting in these last few weeks whilst here in Central America away from the conveniences of home. And yet somehow, someway, we still managed to get ‘er done and have the important dialogues despite geography. It’s pretty mind-boggling to realize how small our little planet actually is…. when you think of it. They are there in Moldova.  We are here in Guatemala. And yet we communicated just fine. So cool!

And now onto our actual post.  Bliss came to Guatemala to celebrate the union of Jonathan + Shalem. Jonathan, originally from Thunder Bay, has been living and teaching English in Central America for several years now.   Shalem hails from Honduras. Together they’ve endured nothing short of a paperwork circus to try and formalize their marriage. In fact, when asked how he first met Shalem, he says to me “what are you, the Embassy?!”. As I probe deeper, it was as simple as “she walked by my house one day and caught my eye.” And when asked what he absolutely digs about her, the words “she’s crazy!” and “she’s a goofball who’s always laughing” and “she has an amazing way with children” come out of his mouth.

We had the opportunity to spend Valentine’s Day with Jonathan + Shalem at an incredible restaurant here in Antigua. Panza Verde was the romantic backdrop for our lovely dinner and impromptu photo session. {The real photo session is yet to come!} There was something old-world and gritty about the setting… so much so that we opted for a black/white edit on this imagery. Please enjoy and check back for more in the next few days!