Ahmed Badawy Married the Same Woman Across Seven Countries

In Egypt, a single wedding is already a logistical endurance test. Budgets stretch to surgical extremes, details are inspected with forensic precision, and every choice, from chair fabric to dessert spoons, is subjected to the unblinking judgment of at least one deeply invested aunt. Most couples spend months surviving one ceremony with their sanity barely intact.

Ahmed Badawy, however, looked at that ordeal and decided to multiply it by seven. Instead of choosing one destination, he chose six more.

“I get asked one question all the time,” Badawy shares with SceneTraveller, laughing. “Where did the idea come from?And I wish I could say it was mine but it was all Mariam."

As a content creator on the verge of matrimony, he didn't want to usher in this new chapter with yet another home makeover series. Suddenly, they were booking flights.

Before their actual elaborate Egyptian wedding ever took place, the Badawyez family found themselves in an unplanned world tour of love, culture, exhaustion, and airline food. Six countries in six weeks. Almost no direct flights. “The shortest travel day was 18 hours,” he says.

The journey opened in Tetouan, where weddings arrive in literal regalia. Heavy silk kaftans. Gold belts cinched tight. Jewelry so heavy it threatens to outpace the bride down the aisle. Men stood in crisp jabadours and flowing selhams and women moved like living tapestries. “From the first country, we understood one thing: this trip was not going to be light.”

Next up was Kenya. "There, the wedding wasn't about us at all. It was more about the tribe, the circle, the ritual.”

Sri Lanka became the most “official” wedding before the final Egyptian seal. The entire ceremony was supported by the Ministry of Tourism. “They didn’t leave out a single detail—full ceremony, too much food, everything.” Badawy recalls.

“The real drama, though, lived in the lower half of the groom’s fit.” Cloth wrapped, folded, and bundled until the groom’s silhouette swelled outward, hips reshaped into something almost sculptural.

Korea was a scramble: plans collapsed at the last minute, timelines evaporated, and suddenly the wedding was something they had to chase down in real time. “With no vendors secured, we spilled into the streets asking strangers for help,” Badawy tells SceneTraveller.

It became clear almost immediately that reorganizing a formal wedding on such short notice was close to impossible. “Korea has one of the lowest marriage rates in the world. Weddings are rare here and anything but spontaneous." In retrospect, arranging an entire ceremony in a day, while in a place where only a fraction of a community actually makes it to the aisle, was never going to happen.

So they did the only thing left to them: they got dressed in their traditional clothing and stepped onto the streets instead. "It couldn't have been more perfect."

The stretch from Korea to Hawaii tested the limits of what travel could reasonably ask from a frail human body. 19 hours in the air, followed by the kind of airport limbo that only happens when visas go wrong. Then, their next destination, Uzbekistan, fell through—paperwork complications blocked every clean exit forward. “We were basically landlocked, with our luggage piled, our options shrinking. Then we heard a boarding call: Hawaii.” And so, wedding No. 5 was now underway. By the time they landed, it was too late to plan anything, so they did the only logical thing left: they attended someone else’s Hawaiian wedding. "At the end of the day, we wanted a Hawaiian ceremony, and we got one!"

Finally, their—at times tumultuous—journey concluded in Istanbul, beneath the Galata Tower. Badawy wore an Ottoman-inspired ceremonial jacket with a structured silhouette and traditional headpiece, while Mariam appeared in a deep red embroidered gown with a long trailing hem.

After six ceremonies, six climates, six cultural languages of love, they returned to Cairo. And only then did the actual legal wedding take place. Ironically, the one with paperwork felt the most surreal. “We had already been married six times emotionally,” Badawy says. “But the Egyptian wedding with our friends and family will always hit different.”