Lossless
I am currently typing this from my house, where I have just spent the first night in almost a week. I do of course have a perfectly good excuse for this absence; after all, it's not every day that one's sister gets married.
This is my record of the goings-on from my perspective.
We shall, as is our usual habit, begin at the beginning - but not too far back. I think it will suffice to go over two years of meeting and courtship and emails about the various ups and downs in their relationship, and we can easily skip to the time some months back when they decided that they would tie the knot. So they made the announcement to family and friends, and that was when the planning began.
It was all very nebulous up to about a month or so ago - from my viewpoint, of course. There was a lot of discussion about bookings and performances and speeches and dresses and things and so on and so forth and eventually most of the issues were resolved to, if not quite crystal clarity, at least to chiaroscuro.
So we proceed quite naturally to the week of the wedding. For the week slightly before the wedding I had had family living with me, partly to consolidate everything and partly to arrange travelling plans. I only mention this because on Thursday night, when most of the packing occurred, we found that nobody had fitting blazers and so a deal of swapping of shirts and ties and blazers occurred between myself and my two brothers.
I had taken a week of leave - five working days, which was one less than had originally been planned because of something the customer wanted to try out (which, due to delays on the customer's side, never actually occurred - still it gave me an extra day to deal with work issues), and took the bus up from Johor to KL on Friday morning. The bus had been slated to leave at 7.45am when I bought the ticket at 7.15, but actually only left at 8 because the driver was holding out for at least 50% of the seats to be filled.
The bus had also been advertised as heading to TBS, but I woke up at Pudu; it seems there had been a split somewhere along the journey while I was sleeping, and the TBS-bound passengers had all transferred to another bus. It was something of a nuisance for me, as I now had to find my way from Pudu to TBS and then to Klang where all the festivities were planned to occur. I did, eventually; and from the Klang KTM station I was fetched to the hotel by my father in a car we had borrowed from my then-future-brother-in-law's father.
At the hotel I put my things in my room, and then met the rest of the family and the friends who had gotten there first. One of the side-effects of having a family like mine, flung across geographical borders, is that any large gathering in one place necessitates a fair amount of logistical work. In this case, there were some friends from Britain who were also staying in the hotel, and some relatives from Johor. So we hung around until everybody who was expected at the hotel that day had arrived, and then went for a swim at the hotel pool. (I note with a certain amount of satisfaction that, despite being large and ungainly, I can still move more swiftly through the water than any of my siblings, though my stamina and breath-holding are still average.)
After swimming we had dinner; and after dinner we faffed about doing nothing in particular until we fell asleep. It was not an entirely peaceful night; Fourth Sister had brought a pair of sugar gliders to the hotel - entirely unlawfully - and one of them had apparently not survived the stress of being passed around several proxies and travelling by car. We did not find out that it was dead until late that night, and it was the source of some anguish.
The next day was the day of the wedding, and it started out leisurely enough. I awoke at 7am and headed downstairs for breakfast, and that breakfast lasted until nearly 9.30am as I and the rest of the family sampled our way through nearly everything the buffet had to offer. In hindsight, this was a very good thing. We eventually left the buffet and went out. I had my own agenda at that time; the rubber support on my glasses had come off the night before and I wanted replacements, and I also had to dispose of the dead sugar glider. So I went to the neighbouring Tesco for an hour or so to place the dead sugar glider under a tree, got my new rubber supports, and bought my father a top-up for his mobile phone.
After that I headed back to the hotel; and the rest of the time was dressing up and making phone calls to make sure of logistics, and taking photos of everybody in their wedding finery, and waiting for transport, and generally being quite flustered until we all arrived at the church nearly half an hour late. (I went to the church in the car of the fiancé of the sister of the groom, which was our first meeting.)
The wedding ceremony in the church went well enough, and after it was all over I had some serendipitous meetings with old friends that I hadn't seen in nearly eight years (or maybe seven? or six?) and there were many photos. One amusing aspect of the photo sessions was that there were so many relatives of both the groom and the bride present at the wedding that it was nearly impossible to fit everybody in.
After the wedding ceremony there was a tea ceremony; then after that, everybody headed off from the church to prepare for the wedding dinner. My part there was quite minimal; I merely helped run the photobooth, which mostly meant getting people to stand at the big backdrop and dress in silly props and take photos, and I set off one of the big cracker things at the big entrance of the happy couple. Otherwise I merely ate, and ate, and ate, and caught up with old friends who were seated at my table. It was good, and I almost surely ate much more than I ought to have. The whole thing ended past midnight, when we had ransacked all the desserts and door-gifts and decorations that we wanted.
The next day was a mess of logistics - again. The morning consisted of going to church, though my elder-younger sister was insistent on staying asleep and didn't go, and my elder-younger brother was showing his girlfriend's parents about town; after church there was a whole mess of calls about who was where and whose stuff was in whose bag and where everybody was going to go and who was going to wait for whom where, etc, and the upshot of it was that everybody ended up in the groom's house while waiting for the entire party to gather itself so we could go to the groom's father's retirement house.
We did, eventually, arrive there. What happened at the retirement house is best given as a list of events:
1. The motorbike ride (on what I think is a salvaged Ducatti) where I got lost and went on an extended ride around the housing area until the brother-in-law's father, the brother-in-law's sister, and the brother-in-law's sister's fiancé came out to find me
2. The scuba-diving lessons, which contained a fair bit of psychological trauma and a lot of tile-counting (and, I will happily admit, quite a lot of fun and cool photos)
3. The neverending food
4. The nightly karaoke sessions - the brother-in-law's father had this home karaoke thing that would even rate your singing, but it only had songs from the 90's or earlier, which excited the aunts and uncles and parents to no end
And then we left the retirement house and returned to this house in Johor, and today has been the last day of my leave and I have to return to work and all its attendant issues tomorrow.
This is my record of the goings-on from my perspective.
We shall, as is our usual habit, begin at the beginning - but not too far back. I think it will suffice to go over two years of meeting and courtship and emails about the various ups and downs in their relationship, and we can easily skip to the time some months back when they decided that they would tie the knot. So they made the announcement to family and friends, and that was when the planning began.
It was all very nebulous up to about a month or so ago - from my viewpoint, of course. There was a lot of discussion about bookings and performances and speeches and dresses and things and so on and so forth and eventually most of the issues were resolved to, if not quite crystal clarity, at least to chiaroscuro.
So we proceed quite naturally to the week of the wedding. For the week slightly before the wedding I had had family living with me, partly to consolidate everything and partly to arrange travelling plans. I only mention this because on Thursday night, when most of the packing occurred, we found that nobody had fitting blazers and so a deal of swapping of shirts and ties and blazers occurred between myself and my two brothers.
I had taken a week of leave - five working days, which was one less than had originally been planned because of something the customer wanted to try out (which, due to delays on the customer's side, never actually occurred - still it gave me an extra day to deal with work issues), and took the bus up from Johor to KL on Friday morning. The bus had been slated to leave at 7.45am when I bought the ticket at 7.15, but actually only left at 8 because the driver was holding out for at least 50% of the seats to be filled.
The bus had also been advertised as heading to TBS, but I woke up at Pudu; it seems there had been a split somewhere along the journey while I was sleeping, and the TBS-bound passengers had all transferred to another bus. It was something of a nuisance for me, as I now had to find my way from Pudu to TBS and then to Klang where all the festivities were planned to occur. I did, eventually; and from the Klang KTM station I was fetched to the hotel by my father in a car we had borrowed from my then-future-brother-in-law's father.
At the hotel I put my things in my room, and then met the rest of the family and the friends who had gotten there first. One of the side-effects of having a family like mine, flung across geographical borders, is that any large gathering in one place necessitates a fair amount of logistical work. In this case, there were some friends from Britain who were also staying in the hotel, and some relatives from Johor. So we hung around until everybody who was expected at the hotel that day had arrived, and then went for a swim at the hotel pool. (I note with a certain amount of satisfaction that, despite being large and ungainly, I can still move more swiftly through the water than any of my siblings, though my stamina and breath-holding are still average.)
After swimming we had dinner; and after dinner we faffed about doing nothing in particular until we fell asleep. It was not an entirely peaceful night; Fourth Sister had brought a pair of sugar gliders to the hotel - entirely unlawfully - and one of them had apparently not survived the stress of being passed around several proxies and travelling by car. We did not find out that it was dead until late that night, and it was the source of some anguish.
The next day was the day of the wedding, and it started out leisurely enough. I awoke at 7am and headed downstairs for breakfast, and that breakfast lasted until nearly 9.30am as I and the rest of the family sampled our way through nearly everything the buffet had to offer. In hindsight, this was a very good thing. We eventually left the buffet and went out. I had my own agenda at that time; the rubber support on my glasses had come off the night before and I wanted replacements, and I also had to dispose of the dead sugar glider. So I went to the neighbouring Tesco for an hour or so to place the dead sugar glider under a tree, got my new rubber supports, and bought my father a top-up for his mobile phone.
After that I headed back to the hotel; and the rest of the time was dressing up and making phone calls to make sure of logistics, and taking photos of everybody in their wedding finery, and waiting for transport, and generally being quite flustered until we all arrived at the church nearly half an hour late. (I went to the church in the car of the fiancé of the sister of the groom, which was our first meeting.)
The wedding ceremony in the church went well enough, and after it was all over I had some serendipitous meetings with old friends that I hadn't seen in nearly eight years (or maybe seven? or six?) and there were many photos. One amusing aspect of the photo sessions was that there were so many relatives of both the groom and the bride present at the wedding that it was nearly impossible to fit everybody in.
After the wedding ceremony there was a tea ceremony; then after that, everybody headed off from the church to prepare for the wedding dinner. My part there was quite minimal; I merely helped run the photobooth, which mostly meant getting people to stand at the big backdrop and dress in silly props and take photos, and I set off one of the big cracker things at the big entrance of the happy couple. Otherwise I merely ate, and ate, and ate, and caught up with old friends who were seated at my table. It was good, and I almost surely ate much more than I ought to have. The whole thing ended past midnight, when we had ransacked all the desserts and door-gifts and decorations that we wanted.
The next day was a mess of logistics - again. The morning consisted of going to church, though my elder-younger sister was insistent on staying asleep and didn't go, and my elder-younger brother was showing his girlfriend's parents about town; after church there was a whole mess of calls about who was where and whose stuff was in whose bag and where everybody was going to go and who was going to wait for whom where, etc, and the upshot of it was that everybody ended up in the groom's house while waiting for the entire party to gather itself so we could go to the groom's father's retirement house.
We did, eventually, arrive there. What happened at the retirement house is best given as a list of events:
1. The motorbike ride (on what I think is a salvaged Ducatti) where I got lost and went on an extended ride around the housing area until the brother-in-law's father, the brother-in-law's sister, and the brother-in-law's sister's fiancé came out to find me
2. The scuba-diving lessons, which contained a fair bit of psychological trauma and a lot of tile-counting (and, I will happily admit, quite a lot of fun and cool photos)
3. The neverending food
4. The nightly karaoke sessions - the brother-in-law's father had this home karaoke thing that would even rate your singing, but it only had songs from the 90's or earlier, which excited the aunts and uncles and parents to no end
And then we left the retirement house and returned to this house in Johor, and today has been the last day of my leave and I have to return to work and all its attendant issues tomorrow.
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