Garys wedding

Yesterday Yinis friends Gary got married. I have only met him once or twice but he is a nice guy good friend of Yini so we were invited. His professor at the university next door to mine had rented a bus for all of Gary's colleges and luckily we got space on that bus too. It was interesting to see a Taiwanese wedding, but perhaps not the most fun thing I have ever been to (weddings seldomly are).  For one thing, there is no difference between the ceremony and the banquet so as soon exactly when the marriage happened, I don’t know. At the start of the wedding, everyone got seated around round tables and Gary kept walking around and greeting everybody.

 

This is the view from my seat

Then the lights dimmed and some kind of presenter told us the couple was coming, they walked down the isle between tables and we threw streamers over them and clapped our hands, smiles all around. When they had taken their seat waiters started serving the food, the chef himself serving the bride and groom.

The chef enters!

After that it was more or less just a fancy dinner with some 10 or so courses and a few speeches and a lottery.

The couple and their parents hold a speech.

Different love songs were always playing in the background. Moreover, the bride wore not one, but three different dresses so she and her husband to be had to make double entrances to show them off. As I perceive it girls normally have enough trouble picking out one dress, how can she stand with choosing three?

The couples second entrance

Yes there was a disco ball during the banquet

The whole wedding banquet was actually at lunch so in the afternoon we had time to do some other things. We and the other Tsing Hua students found a small bikepath outside the city, rented bikes and cyckled around for a while. It was actually a very nice path but, being nice, it was full of Taiwanese and Taiwanese are annoyingly slow on bicycles (fast as all hell on scooters but slow otherwise). It would have been an enjoyable little trip if I hadnt been forced to cycle at an uncomfortably slow pace due to all the other people.  Since we didnt want to stay on the track in the dark we decided to cut it short and only go to a dam across the river. Nothing really special about the dam until we came to the far end and found this:

This is the old dam that was broken in the 921 earthquake.

I think this kind of thing is very fascinating, that nature can do that to such i big piece of concrete and steel in an instant is amazing. The 921 earthquake is the same one that did this by the way: http://twetintaiwan.blogspot.com/2009/06/sista-hembesoksdagen.html

After biking me and Yini declinde to go with the others back on the chartered bus. Instead, we took a local train to nearby Taizhong city, rented a scooter and found a hotel. We spent most of the evening walking around Fengjia night market, one of the biggest, most famous and most crowded in Taiwan. In Chinese the expression for lively 熱鬧 is very close to the expression crowded 吵鬧 and this night market was bordering on the latter some times but it was still a pretty nice evening.

Today was a rather calm day in comparison. We started with some brunch and I found out that Taizhongnese are thirsty:

That rather hefty cup of drink was apparently a medium one, wonder what the big size looks like. Then we found a small alley inhabited by an old man that likes to paint:

This is just a small part of  it, possibly the most brightly colored place in Taiwan

It kind of reminds me of Christiania in Copenhagen, I like it very much just too bad it is a bit too small to spend any amount of time there. The rest of the day was more or less  just about exploring Taizhong, walking around in parks and such, not too special but not bad either.