Five Years Only

I told someone recently that my five-year anniversary was coming up, and he said something like, "Only forty-five to go!" I am not sure what that meant. We should be able to make it seventy-five years or more, right?

Last year I posted a wedding photo, so this year I thought it would be fun to relive the other wedding, the Malaysia wedding, even though that one was a few months later. Jim's parents put it on for us at a hotel in KL. The place has a menu of wedding packages, and his parents picked a winner. It came with fabulously cheesy decorations, including our names in glittery styrofoam letters on the wall, a colossal tiered artificial cake, styrofoam swans, and a champagne tower (which we totally flooded and spilled).


I was keen on getting a cheongsam, which kind of broke my MIL's heart a little- she had pictured me in a fantastic Western gown, and we shopped through the wedding district of KL before I found what I wanted at a department store. Of course I had to buy an extra large one, because I am a towering giantess over there. When I asked her if the shoes I brought were OK, she said yes, as long as I painted my toenails. Heh.

There was some kind of fundraiser going on at his parents' church, where the Ladies' guild was selling kits for this traditional Chinese New Year dish where everyone mixes all the stuff together in a dish in the middle of the table with their chopsticks, and tries to hold up as much of it as they can as high as they can, all together. For longetivy! All the New Year traditions are for longevity or prosperity. Sounds like the Vulcans a little bit. So they arranged with the hotel to substitute the first dish of the wedding banquet with this dish, thereby raising extra funds for this school that the church supports. I throw that in because it shows what good people my in-laws are, but also because it added a weird tenor to the evening, since it continued to be a fundraising event, in addition to a wedding party.

We had a receiving line coming in, and a receiving line going out, so we shook the hand of every single guest twice. We also went around and drank a toast with each of the THIRTY tables, at the end of which, we were all (but especially my 90 pound mother-in-law who doesn't drink) a bit in our cups.

Then, the karaoke started. There were the church friends, goading each other to sing... "Friends, I have it from the mouth of Peter S. that he will donate five thousand ringit to the school if Eleanor and Michael come up on stage to sing a duet." (gasping, clapping, shouting) Duet. Mostly, though, it was the old drunk guys. The list was pretty limited, in their defense, but you would think they might have not needed to sing "Please Release Me" and "Your Cheating Heart" more than twice.

Eventually, Jim was pressured into singing something- he chose "Love Me Tender." Aw, he has a really good singing voice, which made standing up on stage next to the styrofoam swans in my slightly uncomfortable dress and my booze flush a little more romantic, I guess.

Weddings in Malaysia work kind of like mafia weddings in the movies- people just hand over money. So at the end of the night, Jim's dad counted up the take, and after buying dinner and drinks for three hundred people (and the dubious karaoke service), they still came out something like two hundred dollars up. It was really something.

In the same folder on the photo drive are our the pictures of our side trip to Langkawi, a Malaysian island that is just below the Thai border. So I'm throwing a few of those on here as well. We stayed at a beautiful resort that catered, oddly, to Italian tourists, so all of the buffets had Italian food choices on them.
We found some other places to eat, though.


Mah Jong tournaments on the veranda got pretty cutthroat.


What can you say, besides "Laksa Power"...?

Coconuts! Where are the kids in all these pictures? Oh yeah...

Happy anniversary, Jim. We're not always having this kind of fun, but it's never far away.