Photos, videos, the Grand Meeting & much more!

In the past week we have made some further progress, both in terms of the wedding and our future life in China. Let me start with the wedding first.

    In my 3rd entry I wrote that I bought a lot of wedding magazines, and many of them give suggestions on wedding planning in terms of dates. 1 of them provides a checklist, and apparently according to its editors (and the reality) we should start planning 18 months before the wedding (at least that’s when the diet should start and I’m already more than a year behind schedule and still haven’t made any moves). I also downloaded an Apple App called iWedding and am digitally monitoring our plans with technology! ^ ^

The Essential Wedding Checklist, click here for a version readable with the naked eye

iWedding

    After some research, we have decided to ask Peartree Pictures to be our wedding photo/videographer. They were the hands behind some of the stunning pictures I posted of Goodwood House a few entries back.

)Ö(

^ ^

    We were also seriously considering the other two photographers and a videographer that Goodwood provided in their directory: Barrie Downie, Janda and Bloomsbury Films (YouTube). We think Barrie Downie’s pictures look very artistic but too impersonal; Janda’s pictures are the best among all the photographers we’ve looked at but the price is also the highest; Bloomsbury is very professional but we also gave up because of the price.

Barrie Downie’s splendour (with a Chinese couple)

Janda is very sweet and classic.

    On Saturday evening Nicola, Ben and I had a “Grand Meeting” on wedding planning. 3 of us first each brainstormed all the things we still need to do before the wedding (even before 11th August because that’s when we’ll be leaving for China) and combined them in a chronological way. Nicola also made Post-it notes of all the to-dos and dedicated a piece of wall to it.

to-do wall

    Apart from photos and videos, we are going to try out some groom/bestman/groomsmen/usher attires on Saturday with all the boys and after that we’re going to 1 of the most authentic Chinese restaurants in the UK, Old Place, to have dinner. Should be lots of fun!

Ben wants to wear a morning suit.

    Also, on Monday we had a happy reunion with an old friend from uni. He’s a Kent boy and married a Chinese girl (Now they have four children!) and had lived in China for more than 8 years. We got a lot of useful tips from him. Meanwhile Ben just completed his TEFL exam and has already got quite a few job interviews from Shanghai. The future is looking more and more promising and we’re going to give notice of marriage on my birthday!

    Ben and I had a few arguments these days about working attitudes and how we can make our parents happy. I feel we are growing closer and closer together. The more arguments we have, the more we can discover from each other, the easier it can be for us to solve problems. Last week we watched The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel together, and I was really inspired by its tagline: Everything will be all right in the end… If it’s not all right then it’s not the end. That’s it! That’ll be our motto!

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

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♥The Flashback Corner♥

I apologise for not writing this corner in my last entry because the content was quite serious and I got carried away.

    What was our first conversation about? It was a couple of weeks after I first saw him, and it also happened in the dining hall (We call it the Deep End at Westminster, I’ll take some pictures the next time we go back.) at lunchtime. Ben already had his lunch and was doing his homework as I happened to sit next to him. Richard (the Kent guy I mentioned earlier in this entry) was sitting opposite to us and he knew both Ben and me. He said, Miki, Ben is really good at Chinese! Look at his handwriting! I turned and looked at his homework and I could tell Ben was already very embarrassed, but I didn’t make it easier for him.

    “You wrote that character wrong” was the first sentence I ever said to him.

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…