Had to leave O Week early yesterday coz I had to attend Uncle Wayne's wedding dinner; haven't been to any wedding dinners in a long time, it seems. But everything is pretty much the same: I don't recognise or know half the people that I meet (slightly more so now, since my family hasn't been going back to Malaysia for reunion dinners for a couple of years), saying hi and smiling to everyone and yadda yadda yadda.

Struck me at some point during the night though, that the difference between my mum's side of the family and my dad's side of the family really shows when you consider that all the wedding dinners I've attended in my life are for my dad's side of the family.

Then again, the most we hear from my mum's side are from her sisters, only one of whom is married with two sons. We're closer to our mum's side, anyway; we only see our dad's family during reunion dinners or special occasions such as these dinners.

Then at some point of the night, an auntie who married about ten years ago came up to our table and in the course of her conversation with my mum, started talking about how she was remembering her own wedding dinner when she was watching Uncle Wayne and his bride enter the ballroom; she said it was because her own dinner was held in the very same ballroom that we were in right then.

If you must know, all the wedding dinners that I've ever attended have been in Shangri-La. And the Island Ballroom is huge: the doors are twice the height of a person, and the ceiling is three times the height of the doors; the walls are painted (the ceiling as well) with murals and hung with paintings and what I think is meant to look like tapestries, the chandeliers are three-tiered and their diameter is slightly wider than that of the tables; even the chopsticks are heavy because there's some metal (which I suppose is meant to pass for gold) on the ends.

And when I look at all the relatives and the sheer opulence of the ballroom and the amount of money that must surely be needed to secure it, and how my mum always tells my sisters and I that a person's family background is important, and how all the uncles and aunties talk so enthusiastically about who should be the next to marry-- it's vaguely unsettling.

Probably the funniest point of the evening however, was when Auntie Joy was commenting about how it'd been when the two newlyweds' families were all face to face for the first time; she "lamented" about how the boys on the bride's side were too young and if the girls on our side went after them, it'd be like cradle-robbing. :P And on our side, the girls were too old for the boys, and that our girls were too "fierce"; then she made a comment about how all our family's girls were the spunky type. My sis and I agreed on that. Haha... :P