Wedding Follies, Part 5

If you’ve missed the saga of our weddings (yes, more than one!) catch up with part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.

All dressed and ready for our second wedding, my husband and I and our families had greeted our astonished guests (not a whole lot of foreigners even live in his hometown, let alone get married there!), and my father and I were waiting in a smaller banquet hall at the back of the main hall where we would leave to walk up the aisle.

The aisle - lit up and made of glass!

This room also happened to be on the way to the kitchen, so all the waitresses were hanging out there before it was time for them to start serving.  Cue the impromptu cell phone photo shoot!  Once one of them finally worked up the nerve to ask me for a photo, the floodgates opened and I posed for one with each of them, trying all the while to pay attention to the music so that my dad and I wouldn’t miss our cue!

Having already had one wedding (five days earlier!) and somehow managing to have it the way my husband and I (emphasis, sheepishly, on the ‘I’) wanted it, we were a little more relaxed at this one.  For proof of this, see:

-Exhibit A – We had brought a flash drive containing the music we’d chosen for our first wedding and hoped to use it.  However, we also knew that since time was short, it wouldn’t necessarily work out properly, since it was music the wedding company staff weren’t familiar with.  Hence, I was totally unsurprised when the music for the ceremony began and I was treated to the lilting strains of…are you ready?…the theme music from “Pirates of the Caribbean.”

Very pirate-looking, don't you think?!

-Exhibit B – The host.  Ah, the host.  She ‘came with’ the wedding company, unlike our hosts at our first wedding who were my husband’s friends.  This, of course, meant that she knew more than we did about our wedding and was fairly unwilling to listen to anything we had to say (recall earlier that my husband basically had to teach her about the tea ceremony).

The host. You know what would really go well with that cocktail dress? Crocs.

She arrived at the hotel as we were greeting the guests and marched her way into the banquet hall.  I managed to catch a quick glimpse of her, but just enough to recoil in horror.

“She’s wearing Crocs!  She’d best be planning on changing those, or she’s going to be missing some feet!”

Luckily for her feet, she did change into a pair of sky-high stilettos for her hosting duties.

My husband was not a fan of her either especially after the wedding.  We hadn’t had enough time to review what she was planning to say during the wedding in detail, but we assumed it wouldn’t be anything completely stupid.

We were mistaken.  He told me afterward that she spent a great deal of time talking about herself (that’s how she advertises so she can host more weddings – it is a business, after all).  But one thing she said nearly made him lose his cool in the middle of the wedding.  In front of his family and their friends and colleagues, she announced that,

“It has always been his dream to marry a foreigner, and today that dream is coming true.”

A statement that is very false and which my husband found very insulting.  (Note to self:  If we ever get married in his hometown again, do NOT hire that particular wedding host.)

In conclusion, while not perfect, this was also our second wedding in less than a week, we were tired, and not about to get ourselves all worked up about some of this stuff.  We’d already had one wonderful wedding, and were willing to have the second be a bit less of a fight.  And it was lovely anyway (mostly)!

Married - with rings to prove it!!

As I said, we did pretty much the same ceremony as at our first wedding, minus my dad’s speech (no translator, so it would have been lost on people anyway) and vows.  Instead, my husband’s father gave a short speech, made even shorter by the fact that he was unbelievably nervous.  I mean, I think Chinese people speak quickly on a regular day, but this was super speed!  We also linked arms and drank ‘wine’.

My husband's father giving his speech.

Drinking wine

One thing that apparently doesn’t differ no matter where you marry in China seems to be the bubble machines and their proximity to your face.  Again, we were inundated with bubbles, trying valiantly to keep the soap out of our eyes and noses while still looking pretty for the cameras!

As happens all too frequently here, as we sat down to eat (yes, we got to eat at this wedding – score one for Inner Mongolia!) with the important leaders who had given the speeches, I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing out loud.  As my family and I dug into the meal, his idea of making conversation with us was to tell us facts about Canada that he had learned by researching the country on the internet!  I have no idea how my husband managed to keep a straight face while translating, and it was verysweet of him to take the time to learn about our country and show that interest, but it was a bit weird to be ‘taught’ facts we already knew about our own country by a Chinese stranger!

The leader who 'schooled' us on our own country!

As people inhaled their food and abruptly left to return to their busy days (no loiterers there!), we took some photos with various family members and reveled in the fact that our weddings were done.  We were married, perhaps the most married of anyone I’ve ever met (two weddings, plus the legal paperwork).  And after our pair of weddings, we even pondered the idea of taking our “Foreign Woman Marries Chinese Man Wedding Show” on the road!

But the day’s excitement was not quite over yet…

As we made our way through the lobby to the elevator to return to our rooms, we were called over by the front desk staff.  They informed us that the police were coming to see us right away and that they would need to see all the foreigners’ passports.

After the week we’d had, and living in China, we didn’t even bat an eyelash at this news.  We simply headed back up to our rooms, I kicked off my shoes in favour of hotel slippers, and my husband and I gathered my family’s passports before we went back down to meet the police, still wearing our wedding clothes.

Although I myself had never been the subject of police inquiry in Inner Mongolia, it turns out that a group of four foreigners wandering the streets of my husband’s hometown draws a bit more attention, and they were simply checking our visas (and my residency) to ensure that all of us were here legally (there is some sort of crackdown on this going on across China these days, as I’ve had it happen now that I am home in my own city too).

After checking all the dates and making photocopies of the pages they needed, they returned the passports and left us with yet another story to tell.  I mean, who gets visited by the Chinese police on their wedding day?!  Anyone?  No??  Just me?

Let this be a lesson to all of you:  justice in China is never put on hold for anything, even one’s wedding day.That concludes the wedding posts.  I hope you’ve enjoyed reading all about the crazy things that happened during our weddings.  If you want to check out the rest of the photos, you can see them here, here, here, and here.  And anyone who is thinking of asking or suggesting that we move on to having a baby…just try it, I dare you!