Pete's Getting Married

Hello everyone. It has been well over a year since I last posted on this blog (actually, the last post was March 2007) and I wasn't that consistent with the posting even back then. I can't promise much more consistency, but at least there will be a few posts every once in a while.

The big news is, I got married. I'm sorry if this comes as a shock to anyone - that means I failed in my mission of trying to inform everyone. If I forgot to send you an email, my sincerest apologies.

Anyway, here's the short story. Judy and I got engaged in February on Chinese New Year. We were visting my friends Samson and Alice, who have tea fields up in Alishan. It was very romantic, if you're in to that sort of thing. We were taking a walk up in the fields after the sun had set; it was foggy and quiet and there was no one around. I got down on one knee, looked into her eyes, and asked her if she would be my bride. She said ... "Okay." Now, she maintains it's a translation issue, but I still tease her that her response was the same as if I asked her to clean a sink of dirty dishes.

Of course, that was the easy part. I now had ask her family for their blessing. This was nerve-wracking, despite the fact that I see her parents all the time and have dinner at their house once a week. To bolster my confidence, I called my own parents to tell them the good news. They were delighted and started making plans to come for the wedding. Judy told her parents separately - her mom was extatic and cheered, "Yay! Finally! Go, go, get married already!", her dad was more serious and asked about logistical problems. Judy told them I would go over for dinner the next day and ask them personally. I chatted with her mom a bit while we waited for her dad to arrive home. He didn't say much as we settled down to eat - in fact, it was uncomfortably quiet. Then, just as I had put a big bite of rice and chicken into my mouth, her dad said, "So Judy tells us you want to get married." I nearly choked. However, I recovered and we were able to have a nice conversation in which I assured them I would take good care of their darling daughter.

The four of us agreed that there would be two ceremonies: a Western-style ceremony and reception in the morning, followed by a Taiwanese-style wedding banquet in the evening. Judy and I were in charge of planning the morning ceremony (as it is not really a custom here and was mostly for our friends) and her parents were in charge of the banquet (since it was mostly for their friends and family). The banquet would have almost three hundred guests and would mostly be just a bunch of people eating, so Judy and I wanted to make the morning ceremony short, sweet, and touching with perhaps just 40 or so close friends and family. However, Judy decided to invite her students to both the morning and the evening ceremonies so the attendence swelled to over 100. It wasn't as intimate as I thought (and boy were there a lot of cameras) but it was still short, sweet, and touching. I'll talk about that in the next post.