I’ve always
loved a wedding, so when I was invited to the Chinese wedding banquet for a
girl at work, there was no way that I was going to miss the opportunity to
dress up and see how weddings work over here.
Thankfully, despite the late finish
on Saturday night, I woke up on Sunday feeling pretty perky, so following a
morning working out in the gym, eating healthy eggs for breakfast in the sun on
our balcony and then getting through a bit of a laundry stash, I got dressed up
in a smart dress and heels (massive error – I was a giant among the Chinese
masses!) and made my way over to a posh hotels near the city for lunch.
The lunch was held in the ballroom
of the hotel, and it was one of the strangest wedding experiences I have ever
had. The actual wedding, the vows, the speeches and the legal signing of the
registered had already taken place about a year before, so this really was just
a celebratory lunch, with 300 or so people invited along and a fairly heavily
pregnant bride.
The basic structure of the day was
entirely food focused. I arrived just before lunch was due to start, I
registered and dropped my red packet into the collecting box (instead of giving
gifts, it’s traditional to leave a red packet of money for the happy couple –
supposedly giving as much money as you consider your lunch to be worth. I
suppose that explains how they can happily invite so many people to celebrate
with them!)
The two other work colleagues who were coming along were (as usual)
running pretty late, so I made my way through to the table in the giant
ballroom and spent some time getting to grips with the eight-course menu and
the set up of the room. Drinks for the
event were lashings of Chinese tea and a glass or two of red wine, but alcohol
drinking was very much not the focus of the event. Good job the tea was super
tasty.
Once everyone is seated, the bride and groom walk into the room to
cheers, and then go up to the front of the room where there is a stage with two
MCs who talk us through the lunch in both English and Chinese. Once they arrive
at the front of the room they ‘cut the cake’, which is entirely fake – it’s six
layers of plastic, with a ready made cut that they pretend to slice into (it’s
all for show apparently), before sitting with their family as the lunch kicks
off.
There followed an eight course Chinese menu, all of which had to be
eaten with chopsticks, and which featured exciting things like chilled whelks,
fish heads and an utterly bizarre red bean curd for pudding. I did my best,
both with the chopsticks and the food, but I have to admit that a couple of
bits and pieces were sent back to the kitchen!
Half way through the
celebrations the bride and groom leave the room, only to arrive ten minutes
later in different clothes (there must be around five traditional wedding
dresses modelled throughout the entire wedding process) ready for the toasts.
There are no real speeches at these weddings – the MCs at the front of the room
cheers family, friends and the future, and after each little toast the crowd
cheers. Not a normal cheers, but a long, extended, loud and almost offensive
shout. It’s utterly bizarre – it sounded a bit like the sort of cheers you
would expect to hear at a football stadium!
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