Malaysia 2006: Day 3
Wedding festivities-- technically the party last night was the start, but today, the formal things began. The groom and friends met at one house, the bride and her party stay at a separate house. The doors are all barred, and the games begin when the groom's party arrives and tries to fetch the bride away.
I am told that the games normally only last 10 or 15 minutes as they usually need to be at temple shortly thereafter; in Kean and Jianhui's case, next was just the tea ceremony and lunch, so the games went on for almost an hour. It was... entertaining, what the groom and his party had to do to get inside. Sing, give money (in 4 different currencies), do push-ups, remove pieces of clothing, find the youngest child around to open the door, find the bride's shoes hidden inside the house, etc. I actually have no idea if this is particularly unique or not, but it all seemed amusing enough!
We then loaded up in cars and headed to the tea ceremony and lunch; the tea ceremony was fairly formal and seemed to involve all the elder relatives... again, per others, I am told that they could have had a much more formal tea ceremony-- they did not have a formal person to direct the ceremony... (my ABC-ness is very strong as I clearly am out of my league here =P )
Lunch was quite tasty. The whole roasted pig being butchered was delicious. Roast duck and some other goodies were also present-- I wish I could remember more of what we ate... getting used to sweating outside was starting to help.
The wedding festivities concluded for the day, we gathered up part of both Kean and Jianhui's families, and headed to Putraya Jaya to sightsee, including a massive mosque, governor's house, a dramatically styled suspension bridge, the river and lake running through it, and some other stuff. We had waaaay too much fun with cameras there. =)
Dinner was very late-- hot pot outside with both sets of families. Absolutely delicious, but again, the wisdom of having hot pot at 10pm at night in 85F+/80% humidity weather... very, very sweaty. Had to shower very badly afterwards. We had noodles, shrimp, fishballs, thin sliced beef, pretty much all stuff we could get in the USA, just cheaper and at least as tasty, if not more tasty! We did some additional driving afterwards-- just Kean, Jianhui, Sophia, and myself, wandering around downtown Kuala Lumpur to see the nightclubs, prostitution rings, and tourist traps at night, before heading back to Kean's sister's house for some dragonfruit and purple tongues.