Wedding and me on TV with Da Shan 大山

I must say that this was one of the most interesting weekends i had in my entire life...Let's start from the the beginning of a long story :)

On friday our flight was to leave at 15:35 from Beijing but because of massive traffic we didn't make it in time so we went back home and changed our tickets to the next morning flight, no problem there. BUT some people in Chengdu thought we were not gonna be able to get to the wedding in time if we took the morning flight so they told us to go to the airport and buy a new tickets, we went and got it fixed because heavy fog had delayed a plane and it was 2 hours late so they kindly gave us a seat in the plane without any extra charges. Finally in the plane! Flight was around 2,5 hours long and when we arrived in Chengdu it was way past midnight. The food was AWFUL on the plane and it looked worse than dogfood, check it out, YAH YÖK!

After checking into the hotel etc etc the time was already 3 in the morning/night so there was a good 4 hour sleep before we had to get up and dressed for the wedding, boy was i tired yesterday morning!

In chinese custom the groom comes to the bride house with his friends. The groom has to put small red packages filled with money under the door and tell the brides friends how wonderful she is before they open the door. The process takes about 1 hour and is really nice. After a lot of sweet talk to the bride he has to carry her out to the car. There are usually around 10-15 nice expencive cars which you drive with around the city and then go to the place where the wedding is held.

The wedding itself was really awesome! It was kept in Shangri-La, the most exclusive hotel in China. If good hotels are rated 5 starts, this was around 7 :) There were around 400 people present and the show was great. They had light effects, songs, shows, old pictures on a huge screen and what not, not to mention all the terrific food!!

After many hours of drinking good wine and eating good food and chatting (in chinese of course) with people it was time to go to the airport again. At this point i was already so tired my head hurt. I wasn't sleep in the plane because it had the smallest seats i ever sat in! I finished a Japanese book called Norwegian Wood which was really good, can recommend to anyone who's around my age. I arrived in Beijing late in the night and came home to sleep a long night....I had no idea what was waiting for me next day...Wedding pictures will be put up later! I will make a whole album of it, there are plenty of them!

Like normal sundays i go to work, like today. I had some classes and games for the kids and after a while my boss ask me to be on TV tonight with the most famous chinese speaking foreigner called DA SHAN 大山. Well of course i wanna do it! Gotta admit that i was kinda nervous before the show...

The program was about western and chinese culture. It started with a old chinese woman who's son moved to America when he was pretty young.

The old lady was talking about how her son now days drinks coffee for breakfast and eat a few pieces of bread (western customs). So the old woman had started to practice making Marmalade herself. I was to taste her marmalade and it was really really good! So there i was on a famous TV channel BTV3 eating an old lady's marmalade and telling her how good it is...Da shan came into the show a little later and talked about his life in china and compared it with his own country which is Canada. The show was a little boring but now i have been on TV with the most famous foreigner in China. The whole show and everything was only in Chinese but i was somehow able to keep up with the things and didn't make an ass of myself....:)

What a weekend, what did you do?