still haveing new experiences

We went to our first Taiwanese wedding on Saturday. The bride and groom are Christian; the church ceremony wasn’t much different than an American one, except of course that it was in Chinese. Also, at the beginning they applauded the grooms’s coworkers (us and some others) as well as the families and a few other groups present, and at the end they set up a rower of chairs and took pictures of most of the guests with the bride and groom, in various configurations.

There were a lot more people at the reception banquet; apparently it’s common here (and not rude) to skip the ceremony and just attend the reception. Since Ted is the groom’s boss, we were seated at a table near the head table, with some other company managers. Sometimes the boss gets asked to speak, so Ted spent some time beforehand figuring out what to say, but luckily for him no one asked. The banquet was the typical Taiwanese style, where they just keep bringing out food, for a total of 12 course. I remember a lobster dish, some sticky rice, shrimp and snowpeas (yum), chicken, a couple of soups, a thing where you had to assemble a little sandwich of folded bread, a bit of ham and a crunchy wafer (our tablemates were impressed that after they’d demonstrated, we could do it properly, with chopsticks), fruit, and I don’t know what all else. As is usual here, the bride came in dressed in her white wedding gown, changed to another gown (beige satin) for the toasts, then a third one (red) to say goodbye.

On sunday we drove out to Yilan, to make some repairs to Ted’s boat and watch the Asian Rowing Championships. There were participants from everywhere to Japan to Kazakhstan to Iran to Malaysia – not countries we particularly think of as rowing powerhouses, so it was cool to see them there. I especially enjoyed seeing the Iranian women – heads covered and with long sleeves and tights, but in spandex and ready to race.

The announcement about my new role has finally gone out at work, so I’ve been able to talk about it freely, which has been a bit of a relief (before today, I could talk about the new role, but not the move to the Netherlands, though it had been approved by upper management before I mentioned it here). Now I just have to think about what to take with me – for instance, I’ll leave most of our tools here with Ted, and most of our kitchen stuff since I’ll have a furnished place, but I will need to take some things. For one, he can’t have my good knife – which isn’t a problem, since he prefers a serrated one. I’ve been thinking a lot about what I’ll miss here, what I’ll be glad to get away from, what I’m looking forward to there, and what I’m not, so I expect I’ll be writing a lot about those things in the near future.