Chinese Wedding -

One of my colleagues Stella got married last week. She was kind enough to invite me to the wedding, which is really nice of her seeing as I've only known her for a couple of weeks. The wedding was in Stella's home town - Huzhou - which is about 2 hours from Shanghai. They ran buses from Shanghai so all their friends were able to attend. After the night before I woke up to the ringing of my telephone to find that I had overslept and that the bus was waiting for me before it left. I quickly threw on some clothes and ran for a taxi to the bus stop. Luckily I wasn't the last person to arrive and even more lucky was the fact that I could sleep for 2 hours on the bus there.


Chinese weddings are done a bit different to English weddings. Stella and her husband were actually granted their wedding certificate 4 months ago, then they had their wedding photos taken a few months later and they were the ceremony. This was quite a western styled wedding - but with a few subtle differences. Before the couple came down the aisle we had a "this is your life introduction" for both of them - videos and photos of the two growing up, them metting and then a montage of their wedding photos.

One of the more interesting aspects of this wedding was that in Stella's home town it is tradition that when a daughter is born the parents will bury a bottle of wine underground. When the daughter is married they will dig up the wine and drink it at the wedding. The wine was brought round for all the guests to sample and I can honestly say that it was much better tasting than I thought a bottle of wine that had been underground for 25 years would be!

The whole ceremony took place whilst we were eating. The majority of the food was pretty standard fare, but after two or three courses they brought out the speciality for the wedding - Roast Turtle (with the shell on). You eat this a bit like an oyster - pikcing up the shell and biting out the meat - it was awful. I also past up on the Chicken Leg and Ducks Neck!

After dinner they had a "who wants to be a millionaire" style quiz about the couple. They'd randomly placed cards under peopls chairs and if you had one of the cards you had to answer a question. Sods law decides that I ended up sitting in one of the hot seat chairs! I got up and with the help of one of my colleagues was asked to answer the following question:
Which of the following is not a nickname that the husband uses for Stella:
1. Little Darling 2. Little Stupid 3. Little Wife 4. Little Cook. Bare in mind that I have only known Stella for 4 weeks and her husband about 4 minutes I had to be quite careful as I didn;t really want to insult them. I plumped for option C - at random -and got it correct somehow. It turns out that Little Wife means second wife - so would mean that he was calling her his mistress. Lucky guess!

After the wedding the shanghai visitors were taken for a boat ride down the river in the centre of town and then went to the park for a little while. The weather was beautiful and the boat ride was relaxing - in all it was a lovely way to finish a really enjoyable day.




I;'ve got some great ideas for Rugi and Kate's big day in October now - think i'll leave roast turtle off the menu though.