the adventures of pinkaholic girl

Chinese Wedding

The celebrations for my cousin's wedding began last night. It was the bride's family dinner, which meant 100 of my relatives together in one room. Scary. The reception ceremonies are mostly similar to a western wedding reception, except for a few minor differences:

• Dress is decidedly not formal. Many people were there in jeans and t-shirts, including girls in denim skirts. We felt very overdressed.
• They favour singer/entertainers to jazz bands. This is not always a good decision.
• They had a giant fake cake on display (at least 8 tiers) which they pretended to "cut"
• There was a big fanfare and FLAMING SWORDS when they announced the food was served.
• No dancing :( everyone sat around and did the typical asian thing of "no, don't pick me I don't want to participate in your silly games" when the entertainers tried to get people involved.
• They had twenty bottles of red wine to share between 22 tables. No way that would last five mintues at a western wedding.
• Orange was a big theme. Everyone had a glass of orange cordial used to toast the bride and groom when they walked around.

I was on a table with Sharon, Vivien and Aunty Sandy's family including Ah Yee. My parents somehow scored seats on the bridal table along with Sharon's parents, Mei Fong's parents and relatives of the groom. Since I didn't understand most of what was said, Sharon was translating parts of it for us. We spent our time taking lots of photos in the meantime to keep us entertained. Sharon, bless her underaged heart, spent time drinking red wine.

After the reception we headed back to Brunei Lane for some traditional ceremonies including the combing of the bride's hair. However, the same wedding ceremonies advisor was hired for the bride and the groom's side, so she was over at the groom's place until early morning doing all the ceremonial stuff he had to do before today's wedding. Poor Mei Fong had to stay up until at least 2:30 to do all the ceremony stuff and then wake up early today to get ready!

We had breakfast in the hotel this morning (RM22 for a huge buffet) to save time, but we needn't have bothered. When we got to Brunei Lane just before 9am, we encountered the caterers setting up the food for breakfast/lunch. While everyone waited for the groom and the ceremonies master to arrive, we spent time taking pictures with Mei Fong(looking beautiful in her wedding gown), eating, and nominating Adrian as a part of the wedding ceremonies. This was quite funny because the wedding advisor didn't speak English, and we don't speak chinese.

Adrian's role involved greeting the groom, opening his car door when he arrived, and offering tea at various points along the way. When the groom arrives, he has some tea with his enterouge in the bride's house while the bride hides away in her room. The bride and her friends are supposed to make it difficult for the groom to enter the room, and set him a list of challenges he must pass before he can enter. Once all that is done, they have the marriage ceremony, then they go away. Traditionally they are supposed to wait three days before coming back, but now they shortcut and walk around the block. Then they greet all their elders in the tea ceremony, accept red packet gifts, then they give red packets to all the unmarrieds. (I'm paraphrasing this based on some hasty translations from surrounding people when there was loud chanting and clapping going on).

The whole ceremony took about three hours from the bride's side. Most guests left when the bride and groom left for Butterworth (where the groom lives on the mainland) to do it all again for his side. In true Malaysian style, people took a lot of the leftovers from the caterers like bee hoon, curry chicken and kue. A surprising amount of food was gone by 12.

We left to go back to the hotel and rest up before the groom's side reception later that night. Adrian and Dad spent time watching the Thomas Cup badminton competitions between China and Denmark (a couple of days earlier Malaysia was knocked out by Denmark, which is surprising. You don't think that the danes would have a hidden (or even not-so-hidden) talent for badminton.) Afterwards, we spent an hour or so shopping in Gurney Plaza. There's a lot of upmarket stores compared to Komtar, obviously not as cheap but still plenty of shoe shopping. In two days I must have seen at least a thousand varieties of shoes. It's much better than Australia where you only get the same types of shoes wherever you go because everything is a chain store :p

I bought some boots for RM90 and a swimming costume for doing laps. So now I've purchased a suit, shoes, swimming costume, random clothing and other miscellany in preparation for moving.
We met at Brunei Lane later to head for Butterworth, where the groom was having his reception. In contrast to Mei Fong's reception, it was in a scout hall with plastic chairs and folding tables, managed by outside caterers with about three times the people. We had cleverly asked about the dress code in advance, so this time we didn't show up in our formal gear. Adrian even wore jeans.

It was a very bizarre evening. There was an 'entertainer' who sang for the first half of the night, and she was a) way too loud, b) dressed in seventeen different costumes (each song required a costume change), c) pure kitsch. It kept us amused just anticipating what she would change into next. Also, the highlight of the food catering was a dessert soup. It was served in ONE bowl, with ten spoons, so we had a shared bowl of soup between us all (the lucky VIP table actually got one bowl each - how decadent). We couldn't really talk much because we were so near the (very, very loud) speakers, so we let our photography speak amongst us.

Sharon drank a lot of alcohol over three days considering her age. I'm surprised she gets away with it :P

Most other impressions of going back have been different - not bad or good. The food has been tasty, though I wish we got the chance to eat more satay. Penang seems to have a lot more one way roads than I remember, and if you make a wrong turnoff it seems virtually impossible to go back where you want to be, because there are rarely any traffic lights - they just shunt traffic through t-intersections when roads meet other roads (they're all usually one way anyway, and not that the locals would obey the lights if they were there).

I managed to get in some exercise doing laps in the hotel pool. The hotel seems to be going downhill. We got one bar of soap to share between the shower and the sink. And every day we were there, they took our towels for cleaning but didn't have enough to replace them at that point. They send them away for cleaning and replace them later. The problem is that they didn't replace them at all, so every single day we had to call housekeeping to get them to send some towels up (huh? surely if EVERY guest is calling for more towels, you'd make it a habit to replace them early?). We also had a bizarre encounter with the internet connection - every day we had to get the password reset because it was only valid for 24 hrs and it wasn't possible to extend it. They also gave our hotel room to someone else two days into our stay. Dad had to reset our hotel keys, because ours were deactivated. However, we only reset them one at a time so whenever we discovered one was dead, we got it reset and that invalidated the other one. It took us three resets to work this out! By this time, he was really pissed off.

Anyway, i'm now sitting on the flight to Sydney on an Boeing 777-200 which is a 2-5-2 seat configuration. I don't think I've ever been on one before, it does seem a little roomier than an ordinary 747 as long as you're not stuck in the middle seats. The amount of luggage that people bring onto the planes these days is incredible. On my flight from penang, every single overhead compartment had one (or more) of 'on-board' suitcases in it. Are you people really in need of that much stuff on your flight???

Transiting in KL I bought an M&Ms dispenser for Cameron as a housewarming, then spent time looking for pineapple tarts (unsuccessfully). Next time, gadget...

posted by d @ 7:33 am