Last night the missus and I attended a wedding dinner. At this stage of our lives we have become selective of the wedding dinners we choose to attend. Unless we cannot escape, for example the weddings of the children of very close friends and relatives, we would rather cook up some excuse for not being able to make it. Two very good reasons for this are that wedding dinners have the outrageous habit of starting late, very often as much as one hour late, and the other is that the volume at which the "music" is played can drive you up the wall. Once we attended a wedding dinner at one of the beach hotels which had not started even one and a half hours after the appointed time. When I left the ballroom to go to the washroom, I met the bridal couple and their entourage waiting outside the hall. When I asked them what was holding them up, they said that they were waiting for the bride's maid's corsage which was being held up in a traffic jam in town. Can you believe that? In the meantime the guests were groaning and complaining of being hungry. When you attend a wedding dinner it is wise to go armed with a set of ear plugs. If you are seated near one of the loudspeakers, you will probably end up practically deaf at the end of the dinner. It would appear that most people think that music can only be appreciated if it is played at high volume. The only time the missus and I managed to sit through an 8 course wedding dinner was when the host arranged for a 5 piece string ensemble to play at the wedding. Not only did we enjoy the beautiful music but it was also one of the rare occasions when we enjoyed the dinner. As a matter of common practice we would never sit beyond the 4th course of a wedding dinner. We would usually make an excuse to leave early to avoid being driven up the wall by the loud "music". On that particular occasion we not only sat through up to the dessert but we also lingered long enough to wish the married couple well. I was told that a friend once waited for an hour at a wedding dinner which did not show any sign of starting and he was so incensed that he took out his red packet, removed 50% from its content, marched up to the bridal main table, handed over the red packet to the couple and left. Probably he went for a better dinner with the other 50% from the content of the red packet! The moral of the story is to delay handing over the red packet until after the dinner so that you can determine the size of the red packet according to the civility of the host. Wedding dinners in this part of the world are hardly civilised affairs!
2 comments:
HEY, i totally agree with you about wedding dinners. i travelled all the way to singapore for a wedding, which was not only expensive, but boring. and at the end of it, the groom thanked us for eating his food and drinking his beer. i now rank weddings by flight time, ie, a 13 hour flight friend is someone i'd be prepared to fly to london for. i oso pasted my whines about wedding dinners at fatboybakes.blogspot. same template as yours too.
I don't attend weddings outside my hometown and I always marvel at people who can take the trouble to fly thousands of miles to attend a wedding and to be abused by being made to wait an hour or more to be fed. Another trend I have noticed is how the bridal couple will take the trouble to thank a string of attendees from countries all over the world. It would appear that you are not somebody if you don't have guests from different parts of the world at your wedding dinner!
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