South Africa Trip Jan 2007(Part 3, Wedding Night)

After the wedding and the dinner, we were driven back to the house that would host the after party. We were also told that the bride, groom, and 2 sets of parents would be involved in a SECRET wedding ceremony.

"What do you mean, secret?" we'd ask one another.

"Dunno," we'd answer one another.

Later, we learned too late that while the ceremony was indeed secret, we actually had permission to watch the Entering of the Cousin's House By the Groom By Way of Bargaining with The Cousin. Which, is exactly what it sounds like.

Anyway, back at the party house, I asked "Is South Africa dangerous?" and collected a wide array of answers, from "hell no!" to "hell yes!"

I also met a diplomat who got the money together for Hotel Rawanda.

"Excuse me, did you produce Hotel Rawanda??" I asked breathlessly.

"Oh no," came the humble reply, "I just helped get the money together."

"While I agree that Don Cheadle was perfect and fantastic, I shouldn't be credited with the creative decisions," he told us with a smile, shrugging off our starstruckness.

So apparently it wasn't until Canada (recall Nick Nolte's character) also joined in the financing that the humble diplomat realized that they could go all out and assemble their dream team. So they went ahead and picked the director, who then picked everyone else.

Another Hindu tradition is to try to prevent the newlyweds from consummating their marriage by Making a Big Mess On the Marital Bed.

I was not, I'll have you know, a part of this effort, which turned out to involve a lot of foodstuffs tossed on their bed and a hidden alarmclock that rang at 4:30 AM.

But since we all stayed up super late, changing out of our dress up clothes and back into sweats after the guests left, 4:30 AM didn't turn out exactly to be the middle of the night.

The next day, I woke up sick as a dog and literally lay myself out on some cement directly under the African sun without any sunscreen or even sleeves to moreorless die. It wasn't that I'd had too much to drink but that, as Seth theorized, I had metabolic jet lag, where my body was going through digestive processes while I was awake, whereas it had previously kept such processes underwraps and only done them at night. In any case, my arms are still peeling from the sunburn I gave myself that day. (Clap clap clap indeed.)

South Africa Trip Jan 2007 (Part 2)

Did I mention that Hersha and Kogee were getting a Hindu marriage? So the night before the wedding was the Night of Dancing with Sticks, which included a dance performance by the bride.


I learned that whereas western dancing is all about simulating sex acts, Indian dancing is all about simulating household chores, like serving plates and washing stuff.


It is also a night for amatuer photographers to finally get some mileage out of their tripods.


Canadian contingent: Me, Wai, Melissa, Hersha, Kogee, Seth, a relative, Hersha's brother Jitesh, and Kogee's friend Tom.

The bride and groom are not allowed to eat meat for the week leading up to the wedding and they are not allowed to eat anything at all on the day of the wedding until after the ceremony.

On the day of the wedding, as with western weddings, the groom remained hidden in his vehicle and the bride remained in hers. Unlike western weddings, each of them had a decorated coconut that they would later exchange on stage.

Hersha waited in the car with the flower girl while Kogee and his parents went to the wedding hall to meet Hersha's parents.


Look, a National Geographic moment!

Hersha's parents gave Kogee and his parents a dab of red on their heads and then stuck grains of rice on the red part, then fed each of them a cube of sugar. (You can tell I took the time to learn the lingo.)

Then Kogee broke a clay pot.

The flower girl was really cute.


Here you can see Hersha's coconut.

The stage part actually took a very long time and involved food, fire, and both sets of parents.









At the first wedding I ever went to, I accidentally got into the receiving line along with the bride, groom and family. At first I thought people were just in a huggy mood. Fortunately I did not commit the same faux pas this time. Here is Hersha receiving Wai.



[Photo credit: pics 2, 4, and 9 from top go to David Lam and Seth Dworkin.]

South Africa, Jan 11 to 20th, 2007 (Part 1)

We stayed at Hersha's uncle's guest house in Cape Town.


It was a very nice house.


A few of the gang got there before me. When I arrived, we sat by the pool.

The clouds parted, revealing the famous Table Mountain. Perhaps inspired by the culinary reference, the gang told me a culinary story.


Apparently Wai had cooked everyone lunch on their first day in Cape Town. Unfortunately, Wai doesn't cook. I mean literally. She doesn't like her bacon crispy so she just warmed it up a bit and made bacon and egg sandwiches for everyone.


Tom, Melissa, and Wai all partook in the eating. 12 hours later, everyone was lying lethargic on the couch.


Suddenly, Melissa projectile vomitted raw bacon across the living room of the beautiful guest house. The smell made Wai throw down the postchow too. Everything got worse after that and the three of them spent the next few days draining yucky from various openings.

When I arrived, they were mopping up the last of the funkshake, and their bodies had stopped leaking yuckstuffs.


Since all the bedrooms were taken, I slept on a pull out bed in the living room. I tried not to think about how it had probably been covered with chunkchange only days before.

Incredibly, the three of them continued to eat bacon for breakfast for the rest of the week!

[Photo credit for all but the 4th pic goes to David Lam.]

Almost Home

Holy sweet cats. Traveling is fun. I was in a township in S.A. yesterday and now I'm at Portbello Market in London. Can't believe I'm going back to work on Monday. Loads and Loads of picture posts to come, including a hindu wedding and old fashioned Batman...

My High School Friends and I Get Drunk, A Gallery

So this Thursday I'm flyin' out of JFK to Capetown, South Africa for my high school friend Hersha's wedding. I've known her since tenth grade and she's a part of the Nuke.

What is the Nuke?, you ask.

Aside from burning with shame and anger at my having outted them in a public forum, the Nuke is short for the Nucleus.

You see, when I was in grade 12 I started to organize large games of Capture The Flag in my neighbhourhood and at school. Soon, we had a very large group of random people showing up... I even made flyers since not everyone had email back then. Soon we noticed that a core group of kids would show up... this core group became The Nucleus. Logically then, the people who came every once in a while were called The Electrons. This was very useful shorthand. Beat. And extremely nerdy.

Anyway, I'm not gonna front, I am a horrible person at "keeping in touch" with my friends. But the magic of the Nuke is that no matter how different we grow from each other, scattered as we are all over the world, whenever we get together we always revert right back to the same ol' group of happy kids who love to laugh and run around.

A few Christmases ago, we decided to rent a cabin for a week in the great white North. Well, to be accurate, it was a dome that had been featured in Better Homes & Gardens magazine.



On the third night, we decided to do something that we NEVER, EVER, EVER did in high school: we decided to drink.



This is Andrew. I've known him since he was in seventh grade, when he looked exactly the same, except 5 feet tall. He teaches public school in T-dot. Here, I believe he is trying to mix a drink in his mouth instead of in a glass. Did I mention that the Nuke excelled in chemistry and were all card-carrying members of the Chemistry Club? (And I don't mean an ironically named band... I mean actually a club where chemistry was voluntarily practiced.)



This is Rajiv, who was the boyfriend of one of the Nuke members. We always accept the significant others of the Nuke with open arms. Sometimes they shrink away in disgust, but most of the time, like Rajiv, they embrace us right back. Here, we staged a plot to enrage his girlfriend Baanuja by fillng an empty vodka bottle with water and having him guzzle it all down in one go, right in her face. It was wonderful for us. We laughed when her eyes widened with fear and guffawed when he got in trouble. Then we lit a paper bag of poo on fire and threw it under an old lady's wheelchair.



This is Hersha. She's the one getting married! Awwww. I remember noticing her on the bus before we met, and being intimidated by how pretty she was. Who would've thought that a few years later she'd be giving me sloppy absinthe tinted kisses?



This is the bride and groom to be! They are a great team; their bond is more than ionic, it is covalent.



Someone turned the music on in the dome-part of the house and we all tried to raise the domey roof even higher. Notice the bride and groom to be dancing all sexy covalent-like on the left. Notice Rajiv and Baanuja bonding in the back. Notice me and the girls pushing the energy threshhold on the right. And then notice Andrew in the foreground apparently carefully scrutizing the cut of a small diamond, oblivious to the idiots around him.



Getting drunker...



...and drunker. Note that in this picture I have become so drunk that I am actually gasping for air. Soon after this picture was taken, 2 out of 3 people in it passed out.



And they did not rise with the sun.



But it was all worth it. Because as ridiculous as you are dancing awfully together...



...it is always better than dancing awfully alone.

Obligatory Holidaze with the Family Recap, in a Gently Sarcastic Tone with Poignant Ending with Too Many Ellipses

We rented a cabin in the woods of Canada.

It backed onto a lake.

"Don't drive into the lake!" my mom, brother, and I all cried as my dad parked dangerously close to the lake, which had not yet frozen over. From the backseat diagonal to him, I studied the small portion of the right side of his face to see if he was smiling deviously or grimacing homicidally. It felt very familiar, as I have been studying him from this angle since childhood. Unfortunately, from the side, smiles and grimaces are almost identical.

We arrived on the 23rd of December.

"Open your present!" my brother said as soon as we'd emptied the contents of our SUV/minivan hybrid into the cottage.

I shook my head at him pitifully. "Edward, you simply do not understand the whole point of creating anticipation and heightening the gift-opening experience through self-discipline."

"It's bad enough that you already made me give you your gift within half an hour of my arrival yesterday," I continued. "I'm not going to let your impatience ruin my gift receiving experience as well."

But he has always been this way. When I was fourteen I took him Christmas shopping for our parents.

"Let's get dad a goldfish," I declared in the petshop. His four year old face brightened with excitement and its immediate successor, the need to share it.

"But you can NOT tell dad, do you understand?" I stood over him threateningly until he nodded nervously.

Later when my parents picked us up in the parking lot, I reminded him again before I opened the backseat door. Yet as soon as we'd settled in our seats he drawled, "Hey daaad? Do you like FISH?"

My mom laughed softly to herself in the frontseat and I saw the corner of my dad's mouth lift into a smile.

When I punched him for the transgression he looked back at me in surprise, "I didn't tell him anything!"



Our third day at the cottage, it snowed. So lightly that you could almost make out the individual flakes, a sensitive lace that trimmed the trees and coated the calmer parts of the lake.

"Look at the view!" my mom whispered to my brother and I as we stumbled bleary eyed out of our twin beds in our shared bedroom sometime around noon, a good four hours after our parents had gotten up.

"Uh-huh" we mumbled politely before we jostled rudely for the bathroom.

When we were both finished peeing we returned like spoiled pets to the dining table, expecting to be fed. Our mother hopped about between the stove and the microwave and the fridge and us until we held our hands up and grumbled that it was too much. When it comes to giving us food, she will not stop until we grumble. As a result, both my brother and I have been overdosed with and then permanently disgusted with a litany of our once favourite foods.

"You're up!" our dad exclaimed good-naturedly as he walked up from the basement where he had been dutifully attending to the real woodburning fireplace. It took over twenty years but we've finally desensitized him to how late we were capable of sleeping-in.

"It snowed," he pointed out and we all looked beyond the glass sliding doors that opened up to a deck above the lake.

"So beautiful," my mom murmured appreciatively.

"There is an ancient Chinese poem that goes like this," and my dad began to recite it from memory.

"That was the first thing I thought of when I saw the view this morning!" my mom exclaimed.

I looked up from my non-vegan brunch (I do not have the heart to be a vegan when I am home) and smiled at them and how the Chinese education system's emphasis on rote-memory was probably responsible for a lot of such tender moments.

"But, are you sure the third line wasn't..." my mom challenged. But my dad held his ground and they disagreed playfully, albeit heartily.

My brother and I turned our backs to them and ate our food. But, as always, our practiced ears remained alert for any changes in tone or subject matter, ready to diffuse or, in a weak moment, take a side.

The Canadian poet W.H. Snodgrass once wrote a poem about a soldier going home for the first time after fighting in the war, and how his bedroom, lovingly preserved just as he'd left it, felt like a museum display. (This, by the way, is also the only poem I remember from my high school education and I fully intend to name-drop it as often as I can for the rest of my life.) There is a truth to this alienating effect of going home--there is an X-Files poster in my old bedroom that is curling and yellow at the corners, for example. But going home also means plunging right back into your memories and getting your feet wet in 'em in an intimate, interactive way that no museum will ever let you do...