The wedding breakfast

This was held at 6 pm, but really didn’t start til 7 pm.

The hotel is the best one in this part of Putian, and it was beautifully set out. There were about 400 present, 40 tables of ten. The first thing that bamboozled me was that there were two weddings going on at the same time. It is the custom for the bride and groom to stand at the door and greet everyone as they come through. But there were two brides, almost identical, in red dresses and long hair piled on top, and I was aiming for the wrong girl to greet her.

The next thing I knew, Zheng Pins mother had grabbed me by the arm and with jet propulsion had me racing into the dining room towards the tables. I was not impressed. I have had this happen before, when people think that because I am a foreigner, they want to be seen with me, and make it look like I belong to them. I got about two thirds of the way through the tables, when Alex’s cousin came up, grabbed my other arm, and with equal force propelled me towards a table indicating I would sit there. It’s a horrible feeling.

The seating had been a nightmare as I have indicated in previous posts, and while we were waiting for everything to start, uncles and aunties were re-arranging everything and I sat in four seats at three different tables during the next hour. Then they found a Chinese couple who lived in Canada and spoke reasonable English so I was taken to sit with them. That was okay.

They made their grand entrance, and ‘walked up the aisle’, although it was more of a canter, and up onto the stage. This is the ceremonial part of it, where they exchange rings, do the ‘kiss the bride’ and give each other a glass of wine etc. That took about five or ten minutes, then they cut the cake.

I had been up and looked at this cake and I was somewhat unsure of what to think. It was enormous, and liberally decorated with icing and frosting. I thought of all the Chinese people who never eat sugar and can’t stand sugar, having to devour this sickly sweet enormous cake. But I figured it must have been sitting waiting for the wedding for some time, it was quite grubby looking, there was a hair on one of the layers and it didn’t look fresh at all. They cut the top layer of the cake next, and then sat down and the eating began.

(I asked Alex later what happened to the cake. I never saw it after it was cut and there was certainly none of it served to the guests and it had not come to the house. Haha, guess what, it is a sort of a fake one and they only have their own cake on the top layer which they cut, but they never see it again, and they never get to eat it.)

The food was good, in fact if you were Chinese it was banquet style 100%. Lots of sea food, crab, large crayfish, other fish, cockle things, soups, noodle dishes, several octopus dishes, vegetables, all sorts of stuff. Some of it I wouldn’t try. There was a man on the other side of the table who had been to Aussie a few times and was boasting about how good Aussie was compared to China, how good the fish was there, and how big the crayfish were there, much bigger than the ones being served at the wedding. He was a bore, and I ignored him. But he kept insisting that I try this and try that, making quite a fuss of it. In the end, I just was on the verge of being rude and saying no all the time.

Eventually, fruit and watermelon was served, signalling the end of the meal. Then everyone came back here, but how to convey more people than cars took a bit of sorting out too. In the end, the house was full again of relatives all chatting at the tops of their voices in several different dialects…ahah…so noisy. Alex was also a bit the worse for wear, having toasted every table with wine, it’s the custom, every groom gets a bit tiddly at his own wedding. I sat around for a while and then I hit the hay, I was off to Xiamen the next morning. But it was a lovely day, and Alex and Zheng Pin really enjoyed themselves and were happy that there were no great hiccoughs, and in this place being legally married is not quite the real deal, it’s not until you have had the wedding feast that you are considered to be properly married.