Bulgarian municipalities have registered a record number of weddings abroad over the summer, reports say.

Both women and men are pushing for certificates to wed outside of their motherland, and some municipalities get as much as five such requests per day, 24 Hours daily writes.

Officials at Plovdiv municipality claim that they get requests for these certificates all the time, but they registered a true boom in the summer of 2006.

Many Bulgarians who already live abroad combine their summer trip to the Black Sea with a stop at the municipality to pick up their certificate so they can whip up the wedding of their dreams with a foreign soul mate. The majority of Bulgarian brides set off to Germany, Spain, the USA and the Netherlands, the report says.

Foreigners wanted to marry Bulgarian brides, as they "work a lot and are good housewives," Rumyana Dimitrova told the newspaper while waiting for her certificate. "They know how to take care of their man and their house."

Men are also frequent seekers of true love abroad, but the municipalities are seeing more and more often requests from homosexuals, who want to marry their significant others in a country where this is allowed. Their hopes of marital bliss are dampened, however, for officials cannot grant them a certificate, as same-sex marriages are illegal in Bulgaria.

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