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Biggest millennium love-ins: 2000 married in Bangkok

BANGKOK: Two thousand couples aged from 17 to 82 got married in Bangkok on Friday in what was billed as one of the world's biggest millennium love-ins.

An all-day affair, "Thailand Amazing Love 2000" began with a procession of 2,000 grooms through suburban streets on the northwest outskirts of the Thai capital, led by a band of a dozen Thai drummers.

The men then assembled with their brides at a convention centre where they began a traditional Thai ceremony, complete with sermons by a Buddhist monk, pre-marital exchanges of gifts by the couples and a religious offering of food to a local Thai temple to "make merit".

Participants in the mass wedding, many of them Thais or Western men marrying Thai women but also around 300 foreign couples from as far afield as Japan, Korea and Taiwan, said it was the best possible way to end one millennium and begin the next.

"It is a special time of the century," said Scot Alexander Hay, 45, who tied the knot with his Thai fiancee, Wipa.

"With 1,999 other couples getting married it really is fantastic. That is why we decided to do it."

Thai groom Hathachai Keawprak, 43, said he was proud to take part in the ceremony, with so many other men and women pledging their love at the same moment.

"It is an honour for me and my fiancee and I think the other couples feel the same way," he told Reuters. "It gives us a very warm feeling."

The youngest couple were just four years old.

Jutipat and his twin sister Chonnikarn Trionjitvilas attended the ceremony because of an ancient belief that twins of different sexes will die if they are not married as children.

They, and two other sets of Thai child twins, went through the ceremony with the 2,000 adult couples but were not formally married, officials said.

Earlier this week, the wedding's organisers said about 150 foreign couples had pulled out of the mass wedding because of millennium bug jitters. But their places were filled by other clients, most of them locals, they said.-Reuters