One of these "wedding villages".

 Sat 31.8.2024.

Yesterday was the second relative's wedding ceremony we were more or less obliged to attend in one week's span. "Obliged" because it's family. "More or less" because the obligation remains, whatever we decided.

These days they go for these wedding village thing. Fine. Mostly the function would be professionally managed, the more elaborate the more expensive, of course.

This one was no different in that "management" part from last weekend's. But if I were to grade them, last time the party gets top marks. Yesterday's fails.

The preparations of the venues compared well. The surrounding sceneries were basically different but in each case nice. Last week it was urban, in spite of the pretty lake. Yesterday it was forestry, but beautifully set. Last week we had to be ferried by golf-carts because of the limited parking against the distant walk demanded. Yesterday - the same parking woes, but there were a couple of MPV's made available to take guests from their parking spots to the hall. Luckily for us, Dekna gave her car's number earlier, and we were given one of the few parking spaces close to the place.

The failure by me is the choice of location. And the running of events.

The wedded couple is from KL. That's like the other side of the country. Because of the traffic woes. And to make bad worse, we were  stuck in a dead jam just 3 km from site because of a serious and fatal road accident. There were police cars spotted, but not a single one of the policemen came out to control the lock-jam on the narrow, winding and under-repair road to Ulu Langat. There are countless places nearer to their houses that pose less traffic problems. We left Seremban at 5. It's just 60 km. We finally squeezed into the tight parking spot at 7.15. That's about 30 kph all the way ! It just robbed me of the mood.

Then there was the event-management.

This was supposed to be a Malay wedding.  

There was a poor show of a "light show"introduction - I didn't see the theme. Certainly it wasn't Merdeka Day fireworks. 

The bridal entrance was accompanied by some guttural noises instead of the more appropriate salutations to the Holy Prophet. 

And instead of the cake-cutting and feeding of traditional modern weddings, the couple were playing with each other's shoes in a parlour game  of sorts.  A more modern wedding ?

And the MC just got drowned by bad acoustics . The unwalled hall just wasn't helpful with the use of insufficiently powered  p.a.

To top everything, the guests wandered around, unattended, helping themselves to unidentified culinary that wasn't the tastiest I'd come across, especially the mutton, and limited desserts.

I remarked to Ai "Chi oledi" when we were in the toilet "why only two for the whole hall of about 300 people ?"

This was a very young bridal couple from two broken families. For their sakes, I pray theirs would be a more lasting union, though marrying too young won't help. Both bride and groom's parents divorced when they were still at school.

We reached home at precisely 12 midnight. That was a good 7-hour outing - I mean the time-lapse, not the outing proper. At least Adik and Jujai made it, so 3 out of the 4 cousins attended Usop's second kenduri for her 2 children. Even arwah Bangtai's family, except for two, made it all the way from Kuantan, as did Aza & Fadil, all the way from "Ganu Kite".

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