For pictures of the Optional Trip, and my weekend of weddings, click here:
Yesterday afternoon I headed over to Patch's house for her cousins wedding. There really isn't anything too exciting to report about the whole thing, and the main event took place today (Sunday), but since Patch had her university tests today, we only went yesterday. It mostly involved just sitting around and eating, eating, eating, and meeting all of her relatives (and when I say all, I really mean it... her family is HUUUUGE). I had fun though... and didn't end up making a fool of myself by being the only foreigner who didn't know all the customs! Yay me! Her relatives (including the bride, who is her cousin) were all very welcoming, and all wanted to talk to me and such. The bride even gave me a party favour type thing, which was a little cute set of salt and pepper shakers that are shaped like abstract people hugging eachother. For the actual ceremony type part that took place last night.. it mostly just involved chanting in Arabic (which sounded soooo beautiful by the way... I've decided that even though I don't know what the hell they are singing about when the pray, it is one of the most amazing things I've ever heard in my life... like makes me want to re-think my views of everything in the world amazing), and then the Groom had to say some kind of vows (in Arabic) about how he will be a good husband or something along those lines. Apparently the groom has to repeat it over and over again until he gets the whole thing in Arabic completely right, but our groom last night was lucky and got it right on the first go, which apparently never happens. I left the whole party fairly early, under the impression that I would have to wake up at 5 this morning to go swimming with my host sister.. but it turns out that the sports center was closed today, so we just went to another wedding today instead. This one was the wedding of my host mom's friend, and we actually all got dressed up in Muslim outfits, including hi-jabs (the scarf things that cover a woman's head) for it. I borrowed one of my host mom's outfits, that was light purple with a dark purple hi-jab. The wedding wasn't actually all that exciting, we just sat around and ate (I'm beginning to think that's all people ever do at Muslim weddings...) We took a couple of pictures with the bride and groom, and then headed out to do some shopping before going home.
We stopped at Fashion Island so my host dad could buy a wireless internet router (sp?) so I can have internet in my bedroom (which is where I'm writing this from now).. I felt kind of weird walking around a huuge shopping mall wearing my Muslim get-up (weirder than at the wedding, because everyone at the wedding was dressed all up too...) but the interesting thing was that I seemed to get less stares while wearing it out in public than I usually do when I just wear my normal clothes.. Maybe they didn't realize I was a foreigner because they couldn't see my hair? Who knows.. I just found it interesting. Usually I'm very aware of everyone staring at me (which happens alot, trust me.. Thai's just love to stare at foreigners), and today I was very aware of the fact that NOBODY was staring at me.. Weird. When we got back home, I just hung around with my host mom and watched Signs. She was super hungry (being pregnant and all she is hungry all the time) so she just whipped out this huge stash of snacks (chips, cookies, etc) and we sat on her bedroom floor and ate them all. It was one of the more enjoyable moments I've had since I've been here to be honest. She really feels more just like a friend to me than a mom. She has this little electronic dictionary that she carries around with her that converts Thai into English.. so whenever we're having trouble understanding eachother (which is quite often) she just puts the Thai word into the dictionary and then shows me the English word that comes up. It's super helpful actually. And it helps me learn new Thai words as well.
Tomorrow I must wake up early for school.. and just for everybodies information, I did iron my uniform for school tomorrow.. which really just involved my host mom "helping" me iron, and then just just kind of took over the whole job and did it all herself and kept telling me how beautiful it was... Maybe tomorrow I will actually do all of my ironing for myself.
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