To avoid the resulting traffic on the bridge, we walked to Malaysia.
Once on the other side, we rented a car and hit the road. The view from the car included miles and miles of palm plantations, some small villages, and the occasional group of cows, goats or monkeys.
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Aaron had to get back to work at the end of the weekend, but Gabby and I stayed in Malaysia for about five days. Here is some of what we saw:
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beautiful mosques (this one was in Kuantan, on the east coast)
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bustling streets in Kuala Lumpur
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Also in KL, the Petronas Towers. I don’t usually care about tall buildings (at this point, we know we have the technology, so what’s the big deal?), but these buildings shimmer in the day and sparkle at night. They’re beautiful.
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A wide variety of crafts, including the very popular local kites
And on the west coast, in Melaka, we saw the restoration of an aging Buddhist temple
And songbirds nesting in pairs near the ceiling inside our hotel
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But the highlight of our trip was this:
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During our drive along the east coast, we saw a crowd of people at a few roadside tents and pulled off the road hoping to find some lunch. We parked the car and began to walk toward the tents, but as we approached, we realized it didn’t really look like a market. Aaron asked some young men what was going on. “Married,” they told us, and gestured for us to go on toward the tents. We thanked them and began to leave, but then we were told the father of the bride had invited us to stay. Oh boy. Next thing we knew, the woman in the photo below was telling us “Don’t be shy,” and gently herding us toward the area where the guests were dining.
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We didn’t know which would be worse: crashing the wedding in our inappropriate attire, or declining and possibly insulting the hosts. And it was lunchtime, after all… so, we grabbed some plates and hit the buffet. Once we had our food, we had to figure out where to sit. All but two of the women were on one side of the tent, and men were on the other… As we were about to separate, a man smiled and pointed for us all to sit at his table. We settled in to eat and then realized there would be no utensils - we had to do our best at scooping the rice up with our fingertips. I think we all began to regret taking some of the unpeeled shrimp - when you’re only supposed to use your right hand to eat, how do you peel shrimp? Luckily, we noticed the men at our table were using both hands to peel the shrimp, and we were spared the hand-cramping that dish would otherwise have caused. While we ate, many of the adults stared at us (mostly in a friendly way), and the children did laps past our table to get second and third looks. A woman brought us wedding favors (an egg in a cup; see below), and we figured we should probably go before the groom arrived and the actual ceremony began.
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But as we tried to politely make our exit, the wedding photographer spotted us and began snapping lots of photos, and then invited us to pose with the bride. So, we took off our shoes and entered the area where she sat awaiting the groom. A number of people were waiting there with her, so they all watched our photo shoot.
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Afterwards, we went outside to put our shoes back on – except that my shoes were gone. As I searched around, a little boy started laughing and saying something to an adult, and I figured that one of the kids must have hidden my shoes as a joke. I was about ready to consider my fine imported Brazilian flip-flops a wedding gift and walk carefully back to the car, when a young woman walked over to me, stepped out of my flip-flops and smiled. She had just wanted to go for a spin in them, I guess.
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We did manage to leave before the groom arrived, so we didn’t get to meet him. But the wedding photographer gave me his card and I found a shot of the happy couple on-line:
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I also found a shot of the photographer himself at some other event, wearing the same shirt he wore to work the wedding (while our bare arms and legs didn’t seem appropriate at the wedding, neither did his Marijuana t-shirt. I'm not sure if you can read it, but it says something about "10 billion stoned").
If you’re bored at work, I highly recommend checking out this guy’s website (http://monsoon.fotopages.com/) – there are some spectacular Malaysian wedding photos. I’ll leave you with this example:
