China Pt 4: The Food

You know how when you order clothes at a Chinese store or on a Chinese website you find out that their XL size is about the size of a western M at best?  Yeah, so I'm thinking that I'm going to lose some weight in China because they don't eat as much and I'll eat even less because I'll be struggling with chopsticks the whole time.

Oops.  I think it was just because of the holiday season, but oh....my....goodness.  The food was non-stop!  I ate until it hurt so very many times.  It hurts even to remember actually.  It was a buffet every meal!  It's ok if you don't believe me because I have a couple pictures to prove it.

I have more, but I feel I've made my point.

Because it was a special occasion, we ate out with different members of different parts of their families at least once a day.  And we only went to a regular restaurant once.  The rest of the time, we had a private room rented where it was just us.  Sometimes we needed only one table but sometimes we had two.  Other times we had majong tables for the before and after eating.  One incredibly fancy place had its own private karaoke room attached.  That was awesome!

I went to my first Chinese wedding this weekend.  I want to mention here, before I go any further, that these two people are the sweetest, most adorable couple and have been so nice to me on the few occasions we've met.  Ok, disclaimer out of the way, the fun part.

Unfortunately, for me, they had a very traditional western wedding.  I was hoping to see a Chinese one, but the only nods to their country were that they had a minister hold the ceremony in Chinese (after every couple of sentences an interpretor would translate it into English. They also did their vows in both Chinese and English) recognised the couple's parents as also being united by the ceremony, and after the wedding they changed from their white dress and tux to traditional Chinese wedding clothes with a lot of red.

The wedding was very simple.  It was a very budget wedding, the couple warned in their invitaions, with no real reception afterwards, and no gifts requested.

My favorite part of the wedding, I'm almost ashamed to say, was during the speeches given by the bride and groom.  Their messages were lovely, I'm sure (they were delivered in Chinese only) but the pianist, who was behind them, was playing away at what was probably a beautifully soft, sentimental piece of music with his headphones on.  It was an electric piano and something had obviously gone wrong because for the whole 15 minutes or so, no one could hear what he was playing but himself.  I was cracking up the whole time.  The speeches were not as fun for me because I couldn't understand them, so the hand flourishes and the slight rocking of the proud musician were hilarious.  I felt so bad for the guy.  I kept waiting to see if the bride or groom would look back to see where their music was or for someone else to go pull one of the guy's ear phone out so he could hear what we were hearing... which was nothing.  But no.  He played his silent music through to the end.  Bwuah ha ha ha ha!

Something I thought was pretty cool was that they had friends/family in china that couldn't make it so people brought their tablets from home and the people in china got to see the wedding through skype.

I didn't catch the bouquette.  Sigh.  Some brat kid punk decided it would be funny if he caught it.  Grrr.

The groom sang a beautiful song to his bride.  The best man made a speech in which he likened the bride and groom to a flower in a dung heap.  LOL.  And I think, I think, I avoided sticking my foot in my mouth as I met some of Xinye's .  It was a good day.