Need to start proper planning now!

This is my first blog in English and I hope it’s going to be a start of many, many more.

    To be honest I don’t even know where to start now. I finished university on Thursday, got engaged on Friday and turned 180° in 24 hours from being buried in essays and exams to preparing a wedding which is in just over seven months! I am the least romantic person I know. It’s a bizastrous miracle that as a fully-biologically functioning woman, I hardly ever imagined about my wedding day. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that Ben has put me off or anything. My idea was very simple: I love Ben very much and I know he loves me very much too, so our wedding is just going to be a celebration of our love, hosted by his dad and attended by our close families and friends in the church.

    I still think that is a lovely idea, but I do live in the real world, not the Happy and Rose-tinted Wonderland of Ben-Ben & Miki, so I have to get practical. “Life is hard, so be happy!” – a quote from a Japanese film.

 

    Now I have to start making sense. Where shoud I start? The proposal? Although I have a blank planner for the wedding, I did have quite specific requirements for the proposal. I asked Ben to first, talk to Andrew and Nicola about it; secondly, do it when there are just 2 of us; thirdly, surprise me; fourthly, record it. My mind was stuck in my dissertation which was the analysis of the proposal scenes in Downton Abbey when I made these requirements. As I got sick of it, I began to give up on the recording bit.

    When the real thing happened, he really took me off-guard. I decide to keep the details just between the 2 of us but I can tell you that he did fulfil all my 3 wishes! And it was filled with tears, hugs, laughters, kisses and yeses. After that I happily trotted to his room to look at the images of the 3 rings he was interested in but couldn’t decide which one to give to me, so I had a precious chance to choose my own engagement ring:

    It still feels surreal to us that we’re engaged! I’m an engaged woman now! I’m Ben’s fiancée now! Unless I get that idea properly digested I’ll ever be able to talk sense.

Ok the wedding, when is it gonna be? After a few discussions with our families we decided to start our life as one on Friday, 28th December 2012. I apologise to those heat-lovers, because Ben and I are planning to go to China in August but would very much like to come back for Christmas every year (we don’t celebrate Christmas in China properly; all we do is just putting pictures of Santa with his coke all over windows…), we have decided to set the date then. However in May next year in Shanghai we’ll have another reception hosted by my parents. Ben and I want to set the date on Saturday, 4th May 2013, so that the “force” can be with us, haha~

    What else what else? Oh, the venue. We want to get married in the church in Liphook, and we’d like Andrew to do the wedding and Ben’s Godfather Howard to do the mass. And after Nicola and Andrew’s Silver (aka Brian and Judy’s Golden) Anniversary party, I’d love to have our wedding reception in a heated marquee in the garden too! But there are a million other things to think about, from the size of the marquee to the style of the food; from the format of the reception to the transport from the church… Ah! Come back from France, Ben!!!

    About my family, my parents are definitely coming. I have also asked one of my best friends from high school in China to be my maid of honour and she’s also agreed to come. My dad said he’d give me the number on Monday and my mum said it’d be about 6-8 people, including my parents. We have exchanged a couple of emails already, and I’ll start building an archive from now on.

My main concerns are the cultural differences, the language barrier and the difficulty to make everybody happy. Ben and I will be in China during the crucial preparation stage of the wedding which makes it even harder to organise. Nicola kindly warned me that however prepared we are, at least one thing is bound to go wrong at the wedding or reception. If I’m ready for that now, I can take it a lot easier and panic less on the day.

    I don’t know what else to write about at this stage. I’m still in shock of the sudden change of my status. There’s no news from Ben in France yet, and that makes me even more anxious. He’s not coming back until next Sunday, and we need to start looking for jobs asap then. A lot to do a lot to do!

    Oh oh one last thing today, I ironed my first shirt yesterday under Nicola’s help! It was the first time that I discovered the “yoke” of a shirt! I got it confused with the word “yurt” for a while. I hardly wear shirts myself; a qualified double-idiot in both fashion and housework like me is far away from a suitable wife, and the next seven months will see the intensive training of me marching towards that species, I hope.

    Will come back to report soon, and I’m going to re-write all the above in Chinese now…