Zhiyong and Natalie arrived at our hotel room door promptly at 8 AM. From there we walked to a nearby restaurant for breakfast--Mongolian tea with milk, a very good but “fake” borscht soup (according to the disdainful Natalie), a steamed minced pork dumpling each, and a yummy pan fried stuffed crepe-like dish (how is that for a vague description??).
They then helped us run a few errands. The first errand was to drop off some laundry. I must say, doing laundry in China is a challenge. Too late we realized that we would have been better off doing it nightly in our room. There are no laundromats and having laundry done is quite expensive. At any rate, we stopped at one laundry and Zhiyong left in disgust--too much money. Natalie informed us that Zhiyong was definitely instructing us to stay out of sight at the next laundry--inflated price for the obvious Westerners. We then found an ATM machine and did a little grocery shopping. In desperation we bought a jar of instant coffee--Nescafe! Coffee snobs that we are, we were nonetheless thrilled to find some instant coffee to feed our morning cravings. Sad, huh? We looked for but could not find bran cereal or any kind of cereal for that matter.
Then it was off to the train station to welcome the bride and contingent of Dalian family arriving after their 27 hour train ride. It was great fun to be part of the welcoming party and to see some now familiar faces. A bus transported the whole gang back to the hotel. After the tension of room assignments and time for quick showers for most, we headed off to a local Chinese restaurant for lunch. Oh my, and what a lunch it was!
Dish after dish after dish kept arriving. I won’t even attempt to describe them all. One private room was reserved for the women and the other for the men. Poor Mark was on his own in the men’s room since I was with Charlotte in the women’s room. The men especially enjoyed liquid refreshment of the fermented variety (including the powerful rice wine) and there was much toasting and laughter. The women were much more reserved in their drinking but were curious about my age (ALWAYS a question the Chinese ask) and my children.
A word about Chinese wedding traditions as we understand them. First of all, the wedding is hosted by the groom’s family. The family’s honor is involved in being respectful of and providing well for one’s guests. Food and drink are very important. There always needs to be more than enough. The groom’s family also expects to entertain the guests. Zhiyong’s family rose beautifully to the occasion. Zhiyong ended up organizing most everything himself since his father has been undergoing intensive treatment for throat cancer. In fact, his father and sister only arrived back in Manzhouli the day before the wedding--after a 31 hour train ride from the cancer treatment center.
Mark and I were so full after lunch that we begged off going out to dinner with the group. Instead, we popped over to the grocery store and bought a few items for supper plus ultra-pasteurized milk for our morning’s instant coffee (no mini-frig in the room). We were more than satisfied with yogurt, bread and fruit in our room.
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