So it’s becoming a joke these days that my new life tag line should be “Will Travel for Weddings”.

In the past year, I’ve gone to 2 Indian weddings, a Korean wedding (though it was in the US), and an Indonesian wedding. And an Albanian wedding is already in the works for next year.

It started simply because all my international friends (mostly from college) are all back in their home countries getting married. I like my friends and I like to travel. So, why not make a vacation of a wedding? But now, it’s becoming a joke. And I’m seriously considering writing a book. And maybe someday people will start paying me to travel and write about their wedding in my book 😛 It’ll be like Eat Pray Love, but for weddings. And also, I won’t divorce my husband… I’m half kidding about the whole thing. But only half.

So anyway… Indonesia. I have to tell you about this Indonesian wedding…

Where should I start?

Well, going into it, I had NO clue what to expect.

After I confirmed that I would attend, Frisca (the bride) told me through text, “You have a  seat at my table”. Her table? What does that mean? I was picturing a really really really long medieval-style banquet table with the bride and groom on one end, the guests surrounding, and a monkey head on a platter in the middle. I felt confused every time I tried to picture it because I knew that wasn’t quite the right picture. She would have warned me about the monkey head… I think.

The only other information I had was that if my travel dates allowed, I could also attend both the bride and groom’s tea ceremonies. Again, confusion. Tea ceremony. I pictured guests sitting on the floor in a giant circle, holding Japanese style green tea bowls, sipping, bowing,… I asked for more details and she told me that it’s where the bride and groom serve tea to the elders to say thanks and stuff. So then I pictured that same giant circle of only family members with the bride and groom in the middle handing tea to everyone. And in my mind’s eye, all the non-family members stood around the outside of the circle watching every one else drink tea. Hmmmmm….

Needless to say, it was exciting going into it, because clearly I had NO idea what to expect.

After our trip to Lake Toba (Frisca’s parents hired a driver and tour guide for Tiffany and me and a couple from Malaysia to have a private trip to Lake Toba and Berestagi [see post below]), our driver dropped us off near the Reception Hall… Where the festivities would start that evening.

It reminded me a LOT of both of the Indian weddings I attended. With giant floral signs outside the wedding hall with the bride and groom’s names carefully designed…

Frisca’s dad came and gave us room keys to our hotel. I didn’t have any expectations at all. And then we drove up to a 5 star hotel. WOAH. I mean, WOAH. I had already been blown away by Frisca’s family’s generosity, but I was NOT expecting any thing close to this. Granted, 5 star in Indonesia may not quite be 5 star America, but it was for sure the nicest hotel I’ve ever stayed in!

I have pictures, but it probably wouldn’t do it justice…

So we got ready for Part 1 of the wedding. Something I didn’t quite understand, was that, like an Indian wedding, an Indonesian wedding has quite a few different ‘events’ and can last a few days. (Also, I need to specify. In Indonesia, there are 3 main populations, 1. Malays 2. Islanders 3. Chinese. So really, this was a Chinese/Indonesian wedding. Typical of the Chinese Indonesians. I wasn’t sure how much was traditional Chinese and how much was “Indonesian”… ) For Frisca, the occasion required 4 different dresses! Luckily, in Indonesia, it’s not important to buy your wedding dresses like it is here… They have a rental system. You can rent them new or used. New is obviously more expensive, but either way, it’s renting, which is still preferable to buying.

PART 1

First, we headed the Bride’s Reception. A reception with around 500 of the bride’s friends and family (and a few of the groom’s). At the entrance, everyone signs the guestbook and gives their gift –> typically a traditional red envelope filled with money.

We sat around for a while chatting until the reception officially started around an hour later…

Indonesian time is similar to Indian time. Aka. 6pm means it’ll actually start at 7pm. It’s partly because traffic in Medan is RIDICULOUS. And totally unpredictable. Sometimes you can’t tell if it’ll take you 10 minutes to go 5 miles or 50 minutes to go 5 miles. Not exaggerating.

Then, the main event started out with a hoppin dance and Tiffany and I were SO confused.

Just to clarify. None of the dancers have any relation to the bride and groom. They’re just paid wedding performers…

So then, after that, it was almost time for the bride and groom to enter the hall.

But first, there was a song and dance led by fake bridesmaids and a fake bride and groom. I still don’t understand the significance of this, but oh well… After a song about being ready to commit to a relationship, the fake bride and groom escorted in the real bride and groom.

The bride and groom do some ceremonial things on stage, but they’re not officially married this particular night.  They kiss of course. But, it’s not like you’d think. He kisses once on her forehead and once on each of her cheeks.

And then they pour champagne in a really cool way…

And then, they give an on-stage toast with the parents of the bride and groom.

After that, the bride and groom can finally sit down and they start serving the meal. It’s an 8 or 12 course traditional Chinese meal. I can’t remember if it was 8 or 12… I lost track…

Jellyfish definitely made the meal.

I’ve eaten some weird things, but this might have been the weirdest for me.

Foo (Karen from Malaysia’s husband) and I were talking about ancestry at one point on our Lake Toba trip, and somehow it came up that I had a lot of French in my background (from hundreds of years ago). And he decided the reason I was willing to try everything was due to my French heritage… “The French will eat anything!” he told me. Haha. So, it became almost a joke for him to give me weird things to eat…

He put everything on my plate in the picture above and I had NO clue what I was eating other than the jellyfish and century egg.

The jellyfish actually wasn’t bad. It was just WEIRD. It’s texture was CRAZY. If you’ve ever poked a jellyfish on the beach with a stick, you’ll understand. You think it will be squishy and jello-ish, but then it kicks back. It starts like rubber, but then it’s harder than you’d think. It was almost kind of chewy. I can’t describe it in words. The best I can say, is that when I bit into it, I was surprised momentarily because it seemed like it’d be squishier. But then, all of a sudden, it just made sense. Nothing was weird about it. “Exactly like poking a jellyfish with a stick,” I thought. And it all made sense.

Next came the shark fin soup. Something else I was not expecting. This was stranger than the jellyfish to me. It had the consistency of thick snot. I wouldn’t have been grossed out by it, but Tiffany HATES squishy, jello-y, slimy texture and kept telling me how she was eating “snot”. Naturally I started picturing myself eating shark snot and I couldn’t continue.

Actually, it probably wouldn’t have been bad, but I added WAY too much vinegar and I was totally confused by the taste. I could feel my food-related gag reflex starting to kick in after eating so many new and unusual foods, and I knew that if I forced myself to eat more than a few bites, bad things would happen.

We ate and watched dancers/singers…

And then this …

As we ate, the show continued… And then this happened… For real.

They’re even more obsessed with this song than we are!

We also enjoyed the tiny wine glasses while we watched the dancers…

And we enjoyed chatting with Frisca’s brothers and even Yessy’s brother! (Frisca and Yessy are my two friends from Indonesia… They both live in Singapore and studied here at my university on exchange… The groom is Yessy’s cousin. Yessy introduced him to Frisca while they were in the states and took a trip to California to visit him. Such a fun connection!)

On my first trip to Singapore 3 years ago, Henkie bought Yessy and me bus tickets to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia… I had heard about him. And I even touched the tickets he bought for us. But other than that, he’d practically been a phantom. So that was fun to finally put a face to the name!

Before the end of the night, Frisca and Johnson had to sing to each other on stage. Haha. I don’t know about Johnson, but I know Frisca was super embarrassed. Luckily, they played a track that already had a singer, so they could just hide behind the professional 😛 Cute. But that’s definitely not happening at my wedding…

I know her face in the picture above is blurry, but I want you to check out the bedazzle… We laughed about this before the wedding in Singapore… Frisca warned us that everyone would be “bedazzled” at the wedding. She explained how she understood this was so 90s for Americans, but that it’s totally “in” in Indonesia these days. Oh how I wish you could have seen some of the dresses. Sparkletabulous.

Oh, and I forgot to mention… there were DRAWINGS at this wedding. Give-aways! So crazy. Here’s just a hint:

The rest of the night was spent watching the bride and groom take pictures.

And this is how Johnson felt by the end of it all:

One thing that I really appreciated was how obvious it was when the thing was over. I didn’t know how it’d be. If it’d go on for hours. If everyone would linger afterwards. The bride and groom don’t ride off into the sunset on the honeymoon just yet, so I wasn’t sure how it’d all work. It was actually quite abrupt. As soon as the dancers finished, the lights were turned out (except for the lights that were obviously for ‘clean up’ and those special lights for videography, and everyone took the cue to leave. It was kind of bizarre to me actually. Everyone who wasn’t family or an out-of-towner was gone almost instantly. At least it felt that way…

But don’t worry. They’re still not married at this point… A day or two to go…

PART 2.

Part 2 starts 2 days later. I don’t know that it’s typical to have a day in between, or even for it to take so long, but this is how it was for Frisca.

Around 3 or 4am, Frisca headed to a special beauty salon to get her hair and makeup done. Then she came back to her house and put on dress number 2 to wait along with her relatives and friends for the groom to come pick her up around 8am…

We took a lot of pictures while waiting. 🙂

Something that we almost got to do but decided against was “gate-crashing”. It’s actually more of a Singaporean tradition, so even though Frisca and Johnson have lived in Singapore for quite a while, their parents and guests are Indonesian and wouldn’t have understood the tradition of it…

So basically, in the morning, when the groom arrives at the bride’s house, the friends of the bride have to make the groom and his friends do weird and funny things in order to “earn” the key into the bride’s house/room. Past things have included making them dance on video, eating ridiculously gross mixtures, …. and I’m sure much much worse has been done…

Even though we didn’t do it, it was fun to imagine. Maybe some day I’ll get to attend a Singaporean wedding where they do that…

While we waited, we all signed the “Love tree” or “Wedding tree”. You add your fingerprint as the leaves and then sign your name. Really cool idea.

When the groom arrived, Frisca’s dad brought her down the stairs to meet the groom. He was excited as you could expect.

Now the next part happened so fast that it’s still sort of a blurr, so I’ll describe it as best I can…

Basically, the bride and groom sit at one end of this table. Parents and close relatives sit closest to them. And other friends/family sit down the sides.

They start by exchanging rings.

Next, the groom has to feed sweets to the bride’s father and grandfather and some other relatives using one hand and one toothpick…

Then, the bride prepares to pick up a sweet with two hands and two toothpicks to share between herself and the groom. It’s technically cake. But it’s a totally different cake from what we as Americans think of as “cake”. It’s made from rice instead of bread. But it’s different from Korean rice cake. It’s airy and light. But at the same time, oily and heavy. Confusing, I know.

Naturally, there’s a lot of laughter in the whole thing. I mean, picking up rice cake with toothpicks and feeding it to people is kind of a laughter-prone event.

As you can imagine in an Asian wedding, there’s some bowing to elders.

At this point, the bride and groom kiss … on the lips. And I *think* they’re more or less “officially” married. But don’t worry, it’s not over yet…

We took a hundred more pictures and then the bride and groom headed out the door…

PART 3.

Part 3 is short. We didn’t actually participate in part 3… After the Bride and Groom leave the bride’s house, they go to one of the groom’s relatives houses to offer buddhist ceremonial prayers to ancestors… (based on my small understanding, it sounded similar to the idea of ‘poojah’ in Hindu weddings…). Then they travel to the bride’s relative’s house to do the same.

PART 4.

Part 4 is the tea ceremony. There is one at the groom’s house and one at the bride’s house. We only attended the bride’s because it was already such a long day!

Somewhere in between Part 2 and Part 4, the bride changes from her white dress into a red dress. Not sure whether that color is tradition or preference.

So, basically, at the tea ceremony, the bride and groom serve tea to all of the older relatives as a sign of respect…

In return, the relatives give the bride and groom a piece of gold or silver jewelry as a gift.

Check out their bling 😛

Last in the tea ceremony, the bride and groom hand out tiny red packets filled with money (around $2 usd) to all the single guests. It’s so they might have good luck in love soon. 😉

Oh, ya, and then, before it’s “over”, they sit on the couch and eat stuff together. (They’re still wearing all their gift jewelry)…

PART 5.

We left for the airport right after the tea ceremony, but the bride and groom were getting ready for the Groom’s Reception. Similar to the bride’s, but filled with the groom’s guests. She’d put on her 4th dress, re-do her makeup for the umpteenth time and head to the last official event before they can finally be happily married.

Crazy right?

I’m pretty sure most Americans wouldn’t waste their time if it took that long to get married 😛 Kidding. But only halfway…