The Bozzuto's: wedding bells

This past November, Rich and I attended a wedding for one of the local assistants in his office. It was an interesting experience and I'm sorry I didn't blog about it sooner.

The invitation arrived via e-mail and requested a pretty quick response. It turns out this was the preliminary invite and that the response to this would generate a proper invitation. You are basically requesting an invitation by responding yes to this preliminary invite (which also means that you will be giving a gift). The proper invite arrived with only Rich's name on the outside so we were left to ask locals if this meant that I was invited too. We learned that not only was I invited but they encouraged us to bring the baby (we decided to leave her at home with Bonnie). I found it quite entertaining that the invitation included a photograph of the bride and groom - dressed in wedding attire! What about it being bad luck to see the bride in her dress?

Of course, once we figured out that I was invited, I had to figure out what one wears to a Chinese wedding. My research of weddings in Shanghai yielded little help (Google failed me), but Bonnie said to just wear whatever I wanted because there would be people in jeans and people in dresses. I decided on a simple black dress - since you really can't go wrong there! Rich wore a gray suit. Bonnie was right, there was a wide range of outfits - some wore jeans while others wore suits.

The invitation said that the wedding started at 5:30pm so we arrived at the hotel about 5:00pm. We were very early, considering things didn't actually start until 6:30. Apparently these things never start at the time indicated. We were brought to a table that was nicely decorated and included beverages (soft drinks, wine and beer) as well as cigarettes. There was a menu on the table that indicated a traditional Chinese meal would be served (13 dishes and wedding cake).

The ceremony and dinner both started at the same time. Some dishes were served while the bride and groom were performing wedding traditions. Everything was done in Chinese and there was no translation so I'm not really sure what was going on at all times but there were some obvious similarities to weddings as we celebrate them in America. The one that I found most interesting was the bouquet toss - since they invited all single girls AND BOYS to join in for this. A man caught the bouquet and was teased about taking his girlfriend to the alter.

The bride changed three times she had one very formal wedding dress and then two other dresses that she wore for part of the ceremony. There were games for the attendees to play (and prizes for the winners). One of them required the participants to search the room for a size 10 Nike sneaker, a Nokia phone and a tube of lip gloss. One person actually found everything in about 20 seconds!

Once dinner was complete, the wedding was over (about 8:30). The guests all made their way out of the room and everybody told the bride they would see her at work on Monday - no honeymoon for them, right back to work!