Our First Chinese Wedding

We had the opportunity to attend our first wedding in China last week. Needless to say, we learned a lot and had a wonderful time!

When we arrived, the happy couple was there to greet the guests and have a picture made. Here are the girls with their new haircuts, details of this experience can be found in the previous post.

Here's the couple coming down the aisle. One really cool thing is that all the guests are at tables on each side of the aisle. We got to eat during the ceremony, not a bad setup!

See the two clueless foreigners? If you could have read our minds at this point, you would have seen:

Dan: "What are we supposed to d0 again?"

Samantha: "I don't knooww...just stand here and smile!"

About two minutes beforehand, we had been asked to be part of the line that stands in the aisle and passes the wedding rings up to the couple at the front. Sounds pretty easy, except that we were at the front of the line with about 20 feet between us and the wedding couple.

Here the parents of the bride and groom speak and wish the couple well (we're assuming because it was all in Chinese).

What a great experience and honor to share this day with Bao and his new bride!

Where are the girls?!!

We really wanted to share this one with you, but a disclaimer first. Joe, our driver, is a great guy and routinely takes the girls to school, to a friends house and such without one of us being with them.

OK, last Saturday Dan and I were going out to run. Cecilia (our helper, yeah...it's rough here)was with the girls and Joe was parked out front. So I told him that later that afternoon I was going to get the girls' hair cut, headed to a wedding that evening, and he would need to take us (now mind you, he doesn't speak English and we don't speak Chinese) so this is all done with hand gestures! He kept saying OK, OK. pointing to himself and stuff. Well, we come back from running and the van is gone...we go inside and...so are the girls!!! Dan says " I bet Joe took them for a haircut!" and my response (as you can imagine) was "What?...Nooo!!" A few mintues later the phone rang:

"Hello?"

"Daddy, it's Sydney. Joe took us to get our haircut, but I don't think this is the place where Momma made the appoitnment. They just washed Caroline's hair and they are about to cut SJ's! What should I do?"

Dan told her it was okay. We totally trust Joe, so that is not the problem. But in an effort to be nice, he had taken them to someone he knows to get their hair cut!!! Not the safe overpriced Western place I where I had made appointments. Dan kept reminding me that their hair would grow back!!! So we waited-they finally arrived home and really it wasn't too bad. Not my first choice but he was so proud, paid for it himself and won't let us pay him back! It is all good but not always easy and it is definitely always something!