A Chunderous Wedding

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Greetings fellow Volcanoligists,

Thanks to the earthquake in Taiwan it has been impossible to access the electrical interwebs in a timely manner, hence the massive delay (and no doubt much consternation on your part being bereft of my awesome writing powers for so long) with an update. A fair bit has happened so I am going to split the past few weeks up into reasonably small entries for the benefit of your tiny attention spans....

I shall pick up in My Tho where we left off.

So it came time to attend the wedding. Now weddings here in Vietnam come in two parts; there is a ceremony and a reception for the brides family and then another for the groom. It just so happened that the bride lived in Can Tho, a fairly big city in the Mekong Delta about 100kms ( or thereabouts) from My Tho. We had been invited to attend both, in order to do so we had to be out the front of our lodgings at 5am to meet the bus. That meant that I had to be up even earlier in order to complete my 65km bike/swim session and Sarah had to get the Nepalese Tupperware sales women in early in order to receive her twice-daily massage. Having overcome these hurdles we walked out into the car park to find that the front gates were locked and we were trapped inside. So taking the situation into my own hands, and using my immense strength, I jumped over the wall that surrounded the compound (yes it was like a military compound) but unfortunately I forgot that Sarah is not as tall as me and couldn't scramble over the wall. As she was trying, some old Vietnamese women who were out on the road burning a massive pile of refuse (in the middle of the road mind), saw her attempts at getting over and laughed in a haughty Asian fashion. Then they turned on their heels and rang the bell at the gatehouse of the hotel and the young gentleman in the gatehouse simply opened the gate for her and laughed. If only we'd known.....
The bus arrived and we began our journey to Can Tho. Wow, the scenery was magnificent, orchards and rice paddies, punctuated by rivers and streams that were lined with towns that were as poor as we had ever seen. The various rivers were brimming with river traffic taking everything from fruit, fish and pigs to the various hamlets and villages that lined them. There were old fashioned brick-works that spewed out thick black smoke from the rice husks that they used to fire the kilns. It sounds idyllic doesn't it? Well I guess it was in a sense; however the visual splendour was ripped asunder by the absolutely abysmal quality of the highway. You see after a while the tar ended and the dirt started. And let me tell you fellow Civil Engineers, there were potholes, many potholes that were in actuality the size of small bomb craters. To add to this the driver really didn't see any need to slow down too much for them either. So after the arduous 5 hour trip both our kidneys had failed and we went into renal failure. Luckily for us Sarah is a Nephrologist of some repute and she was able to right the massive damage sustained to our kidneys with a treatment of various roots and bark found in the jungle near Can Tho.
Upon arriving at the bride’s house we were informed that we were to be a part of the ceremony. Zoinks! First the oldest gentlemen of the groom’s party has to go into the house and ask permission to enter and begin the ceremony. After this permission is granted gifts are given. The gifts are given to the bride’s father by 6 bearers. Sarah and I were two of these bearers, with Sarah giving some dead pig and me giving some, bread, tea and flowers. And that was it as far as our part in the ceremony went. Not as scary as we thought. The actual marriage ceremony took little more than ten minutes and then the food started. My god! So much food. 7 courses of the stuff and it never stopped coming. As usual I was seated with a bunch of elderly gentlemen, who when not trying to top my bowl up with food were content to feel how big my arms were. Sarah sitting with the women was also force fed food until she was about to burst. While in such situations I am a little uneasy, Sarah shines as a beacon of congeniality, warmth, understanding, friendship and utter happiness and despite the language barrier makes all those around her feel at ease and take an instant like to her. She is proof that there is good in the world.

At a wedding in Australia the reception starts in the afternoon and goes well into the night. Things are a little different here. The reception starts at 11am, everyone scoffs those 7 courses into them in an hour and then leaves. Straight up that's how it goes. You look around one minute, there is a throng of people laughing, drinking and eating and the next minute they're gone. After the ceremony we took off to the guest house where we were staying for the night and then to a tourist attraction (a very loose term). It was supposed to be a nature reserve but it turned out to be a place where storks come to roost and lay eggs. There was a platform up in the jungle canopy where you could watch them sitting in their nests. Not very exciting, in fact it sucked, so we rode back to the guest house and spent the afternoon drinking coffee and being stared at by the locals. That night Sarah, Van, Chung and I headed to a city called Long Xuyen about 15kms up the road to check out the night life. We stopped at a kind of exihibition for white goods or something like that. It was strange but crammed with people. My god I have never been stared at or followed around by so many people in my life. It was VERY confronting. I was surrounded by about 8 or 9 kids all looking at me and saying "Troi Oi!" which is Vietnamese for 'Oh My God!' They had obviously never seen anyone of my size before and were all touching my ripped biceps and washboard stomach. They kept asking me to pick them up. Weird. We hastily did the Harold and headed back to bed.
The next morning we were up again and on the road at 5am, this time we had to take the bride with us back to My Tho. We picked her up dressed in a beautiful red traditional gown with matching headpiece and set off. I kept looking at the bride in the front and noticed that she was chewing gum; I thought this odd because quite frankly it made her look like a bogan. I turned my head to look out the window for second then turned back towards the bride. There she was resplendent and glorious in her traditional gown with her head in a plastic shopping bag chucking her guts up. Glorious. Sarah and I looked at each other waiting for the van to stop so she could compose herself, but nope, not a single person battered an eyelid and were quite happy to let her hurl herself stupid. Apparently (and this has been confirmed by our own experience) the Vietnamese suffer from perennial car sickness and everyone hurls on busses and in cars, when the bag is full they throw that bad boy out the window and keep on truckin'. The rest of the 5 hour journey (particularly the potholed part) was one atomic chunder after another for the bride and one almighty feast for our noses.
After arriving back at My Tho the bridal party went to the grooms house for the ceremony while the rest of us headed to the reception centre situated right on the Mekong for yet another feast of epic proportions. We barely made it out alive, our stomachs so full. We jumped on our motorbike and headed back to the hotel after saying our goodbye to our second family as the next day we were to depart for a 3 day tour of the Mekong with Sarah hoping to complete her life long research on infectious diseases of the Antarctic along the way.

Goodbye My Tho, farewell Van, Kieu, Loan and family. Thank you so much for an experience that only you could make possible.

Sunny and overcast with rapturous bursts of stomach contents up to 700 metres.

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Comments

[Veness]

Good to hear your pixels
Jason!Sarah! Good god, I thought you had been trapped on another of those always at the end of the news for five seconds ferry tragedies where thousands of (non-white) folk die between the steak and second helping of mash. Anyway, 5 (five) Australians are missing, feared drown somewhere near Borneo so I'd best get back to writing 50004237487 words on them and the grief of their fucking families.