Wedding in Taiwan!

Since I got here, I've been seeing post after post pop up on my fellow ETAs' walls, proclaiming that they've been at a Taiwanese wedding feast. Some have liked it, some haven't, and all have come away talking about the lavishness of the food and traditions accompanying it. Several people have been to more than one. Yet, eight and a half months into my stay here, I had yet to experience one myself.

Until tonight, that is! My principal's daughter got married (as I noted here, I recently got wedding cake for the occasion), and as a part of the (many, many) ceremonies attending that, the principal invited all of the teachers at 漢民 (Hanmin) to the wedding feast. Let me be clear: Hamin's a big school--something between 2 and 3,000 students big. Hanmin teachers easily took up 16 or so 12-person tables.

Yet even so, our numbers were dwarfed by the assembly as a whole. According to Fiona, there were 130 12-person tables set for the wedding, which makes for a whopping 1,560 attendees! Even taking into consideration the fact that some people didn't come, there were definitely at least 1,200 people in the assembly room.

One very small portion of the hall. You can kind of see the front wall/stage area next to the no smoking sign...

Opulence was definitely the name of the game. Oh, and did I mention that the assembly room in question was in the downstairs portion of the Bao-an Temple by Golden Lion Lake, a famous (and HUGE) Kaohsiung Daoist temple?

This also can't convey scale, but see how it's got a special bridge leading directly and specifically to it? Yeah.

 (Here's a link to a more comprehensive view of how huge and elaborately decorated this place is.)

We were early (Fiona picked Ingrid and I up at my place and drove ), and spent the first couple hours chit-chatting and talking about the many many things involved in making a successful Taiwanese wedding and all the things people do to ensure good luck for the married couple. At some point, music started; at some later point, a video stream showing the wedding party taking part in all the traditions began on the several TVs around the room. Also at some point, it became all but impossible for us to hear one another.

Ingrid discovering that the cups at our first table had Coca-Cola insignias on them :)

Fiona waiting with the Academic Director's son (dressed all in green plaid, poor boy) concentrating on his video games.

Each row is another course: count 'em up, 12!

Soon, everyone was there--Alison and Maggie joined us to form a whole row of English teachers, and eventually a few other people, starting with the music teacher who shares our office, took courage to sit with us--and the feasting began! SO much seafood, ranging from lobster to an angry-looking (but delicious-tasting) fish to shrimp-flavored rice.

Oh yeah, and a black chicken soup! Because why not?

Final course: ice cream bars. We made it!

Between dishes, we had such lovely little experiences as Teacher Penguin thrusting vegetarian dishes onto our plates (I guess he didn't want them or something?), my tutoree Hal coming over for a chat (odd out-of-context encounter I should have thought about, since his dad's a Hanmin teacher), more than a few completely missed main events (we could hear a muffled version of what was going on, but could only see if they turned on the video cameras, something they failed to do for, for instance, a dance routine some group did).

Also, of course, we got to see the beautiful bride and bridal procession, which paraded around the hall for everyone to see. :)

The bride with her dad: blurry but still beautiful!

By the time we were ready to pack up and head home, my stomach felt like it would pop and I felt fully initiated into the rites of a Taiwanese wedding banquet. On the way out the bride (in at least her 3rd dress of the evening; possibly 4th) and her family gave everyone candies as they exited.

An exhausting, but wonderful experience! And now I, too, can add my post on a Taiwanese wedding to the pantheon of ETA postings; I, too, have experienced the largesse of a Taiwanese wedding, and I, too, have the bloated belly to prove it. Quite the night!

Alex and Melanie's Wedding

Still on my delayed-writing catch-up schedule, here I will finally write about the reason for all the timing oddities and delays: my brother got married on Saturday!

It was a beautiful wedding: simple but elegant in a way that most, if not all, weddings aim for. The main colors were light grey and red, which I was a bit skeptical of when I first heard about it, but I knew better than to doubt Melanie's impeccable taste: I have never seen anything but perfection in her artistic sensibilities (she's a graphic design major).

The actual process of getting to the wedding was surprisingly smooth, if draining. Both of my flights were on time, which was lovely. And, after our late-night/early-morning adventure in Taipei, I discovered that, given the right circumstances, I CAN in fact sleep on planes. When I'm not watching the in-flight movie or jostling my feet back and forth trying to keep them from falling asleep too, that is. I'm estimating that I got roughly 6 hours on the planes; add them to the 2 hours from Taipei and divide by 2 days, and it suddenly makes a ton of sense how exhausted I was when I finally reached the States!

My dear friend Lindsey met me at the airport and, like the saint that she is, took me immediately to get some coffee from Peet's. Great way to be welcomed back to the land where coffee, not tea, is the staple of daily life!

So the next few hours were spent getting ready for the wedding, with hair help from Lindsey and two of my fantastic cousins, Mollie and Julia. I was a bridesmaid, so I had to have hair that was up or pinned back, not an easy feat with chin-length hair, but Julia managed it! I don't know how I would have done it without their help.

This is true not only because I fail at hair, but because, while we were getting ready, it was late evening in Taiwan. By the time I arrived at the venue, it was way past midnight. During photos and before the ceremony was the worst--the hours no one is ever *really* awake for. But by the time the ceremony started, I was awake and ready to not trip as I walked down the aisle, and then to somehow guess an appropriate place to stand, since I was the first one in and hadn't been at rehearsal.The ceremony itself was wonderful; the pastor--Melanie's grandpa--had a wonderful message on marriage, and Melanie and Alex had written their own vows, which I may want to steal and re-use someday.

The reception was similarly wonderful, as I got to see so many people I haven't seen in years, eat delicious food,  help decorate Alex and Melanie's car, and hang out with the wedding party/my brothers' friends from Oregon State. It was a great group which made me slightly regret not going there--the same thing happens every time I hang out with Alex and Scott's friends--but I'm still glad I went where I did for college.

So we saw them off, despite their efforts to sneak away, and then stood around in circles chatting. About 40 minutes later, the word begins circling: Alex and Melanie had forgotten to sign the marriage certificate; they were coming back to do that now. Well, every wedding needs a story!

The next day, my family drove me back up to PDX and I boarded a plane for Tokyo, then on to Taipei. From there I hopped a bus to the HSR station, after an interesting exchange with the attendant who spoke no English:
me: High Speed Rail?"
her: blank stare.
me: "Kaohsiung?" her: something I can't understand.
me: "Train?"
her: *points at something that looks like a schedule but is written only in Chinese*
me: *points at the giant sign before which reads, in English, "HSR Station."
She gives me a ticket and circles the price.
I thought everyone spoke English in Taipei! Apparently not.

More troubles ensued when I got back to Kaohsiung to discover that the MRT had stopped running and someone else had just taken the last taxi waiting by the train depot. After several people standing around took a stab at using their English with me, a nice man began translating and then went with me to flag down a cab. There were no cabs in sight. He offered to drive me home, along with his wife, but that prospect scared me (probably without cause--he seemed genuinely trustworthy, and helpfulness is a cultural norm here, from what I can tell), so he ran all over the intersection to get me a cab, then told the driver where to take me. So grateful for this man's help--I finally got back to my apartment and, after paying the driver much more than I'm sure was reasonable, went up to my apartment.

So now I'm back! And that, in a (very small) nutshell, was my weekend. Perhaps I'm on blogging schedule now?