Last night we went to Christin and Lee Fong's wedding in Johor Bahru, which is right across the water from Singapore in Malaysia. It's seriously like Windsor to Detroit.
Matt was a "brother" in the wedding, so he actually was there for the whole of Sunday, which sounds like it was quite an experience. Lee Fong is Chinese, and grew up on JB, and Christian is Filipino and grew up in Athens, Georgia. The wedding was a Chinese wedding.
First, Matt went to the Gate Crashing Ceremony, which is like the Jewish B'deken. Christian and his brothers showed up at LF's house, and they had to do a bunch of tasks before he could get let in. Here sister and friends were "keeping the gates." It sounds kind of like Double Dare. They had to hit some badminton strokes, they had to put on a certain pair of underwear, they had to put on lipstick and kiss each other...it all sounds pretty hilarious. Finally, Christian gets let in, and he got to see LF in all of her beauty (she's really cute), and he had tea with her family. That meant they were married.
I took a cab to the hotel there with a few of the SAIS (Matt's grad school) people. We ended up staying by the pool and talking and playing euchre for about six hours. We also got to watch Missouri and Oklahoma, which was a pretty exciting game.
Anyways, the wedding was a mad feast of crazy amounts of food. We had about eight courses. It was really nice - they had friends there from Hong Kong, Bangkok, Borneo, Jakarta, and people came in from the States...Lots of SAISers.
At Jewish weddings people dance. At this wedding it was all singing - karaoke city. People were singing with background music, and it was awesome. They were no joke - really good voices! They had two emcees, and there were even a few slide shows.
They also do this thing where everyone puts their glasses up and together and calls yam seng. But they don't say it like that. They say it like, "yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaam seng." And the "yam" is really loud and sometimes painful.
A highlight for me is when I went to wash my hands in the bathroom, and this woman came out and said, "be careful - there's a man in there." There was an old man puking in the women's bathroom. Did I mention there was a lot of alcohol at this wedding?
Congratulations to Christian and Lee Fong! Check out photos here.
In SUPER sad news - we are pretty sure that they took our cat away. It seems as though the complex called an extermination company to come and collect the cats, and we haven't seen her since Thursday morning. I'm REALLY sad about that. She was really a part of our family, and she made coming home so nice and exciting. I miss her. Matt's going to call the company tomorrow and see if there's any chance she's still alive, but I seriously doubt it. :(
1 comment:
The wedding sound like a lot of fun. I'd love to see the pics.
But I sympathize with you guys and the cat. When I was teaching in the youth aliyah village near Haifa, I adopted a dog. There was a pack of puppies that some 9th grade girls took in, but were completely incompetent in taking care of. So I took in one and we turned the rest in to the animal shelter.
Well, the puppy, Lola, was very young and I had to take her everywhere. She was so cute, but would cry to be apart at all. I had her for a couple months and things were going better, and she was starting to gain some independence. But I felt bad when i had to leave to J'slem for the weekend, but a friend of mine (my student from Tibet - long story) was happy to watch Lola for the weekend. Well, he set her outside for a minute while he went to get something from his room, and she disappeared. She knew where my apartment was, but never turned up anywhere. We looked for days and days, but never found her. Apparently, it was common for dogs to get dropped off, but also people would see puppies in that area and just as quickly take them. So I hope Lola found a good home. It was very sad to let her go.
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