Engagement Tea Ceremony

Last month Anh and I celebrated our engagement....... again :)

This time was a traditional engagement tea ceremony.

From what I was told, the Vietnamese engagement tea ceremony involves the groom's family bringing gifts to the bride's house as offering for the bride's hand in marriage.

They said back in the old days, when marriages were still arranged, this would be the first time the bride and groom meet.  And that the gifts were kinda like a down payment or a deposit in case the groom ran away. Hahahaha.


Okay, maybe I made that last bit up.  I'm not really sure of the history but I'm guessing its originated from the Chinese marriage tea ceremony, which is very similar.

It was cloudy that day but thankfully it didn't rain.

The actual tea ceremony didn't run according to plan but it was just all laughs and giggles in the end.

Anh's family worried if the Groom was any good

Pink is the new black

There were plenty of food and great company which made for a great day.

Thank you to everyone who helped out.  A lot of people put a lot of work for this day and it was just really nice to have everyone there enjoy it with us.

I'm looking forward to the big day - its gonna have firecrackers and a whole pig!

Engagement BBQ

Haven't been blogging for a while. Been busy with so many things lately. Primarily playing games on Steam wedding and engagement related stuff :P

Last Saturday was a HUGE milestone for Anh and me! We organised our first big event together and held our engagement BBQ!!

We didn't want it fancy, we just wanted it super fun - so we pulled out every trick in the book to make it a super enjoyable event :P

We had a big lamb roast,

Soooo goood, I can't wait for the next lamb roast

Octopus hotdogs,

Weiners

Slushy machine and watermelon vodka,

Epic fail - watermelon vodka = gross

and then we played games.

Toilet paper - wedding dress game

But the best part was setting up a video camera to make a diary room!

The idea was from Big Brother and we were hoping friends would just leave short clips and heartfelt messages. Who would have thought alcoholic slushy and a video camera would make such hilarious combination.

Pam and Ben's clip included sign language for the deaf

Som with some really really random and funny clips

The party rounded up quite late and was already 3am Sunday before we got to sleep.

But even so, we're so happy. We feel super blessed for having such awesome family and great friends around us.

Love you all!

The Celebrant Part 1

I promise no wedding related post next week :)

Just wanted to post that Anh and I met our priest yesterday.

We're so glad Father Joe is the celebrant for our wedding. He's been my parish priest for ages and I really enjoy his work. He's really fun and really easy going. In fact, its him who makes it easy for me to go to church every week.

When we got to his house, he got us straight into filling out forms.

Lots and lots and lots of forms!

One form for the church, one form for the bishop, one form for priest... and then gave us more forms for homework! He's asked us to book ourselves for some 'marriage counselling'. My brother said the counselling thing is quite good, but all I'm thinking in my head is Robin Williams and Mandy Moore. We'll see.

We also did some short vows during our session. It was quite funny. The way Father Joe explained it was something like "do you promise that you're marrying your partner not for his or her money?" hahah as if?! There were more stuff like that, but it did feel nice being there having a mini-wedding ceremony.

I have to look after the kids faith apparently.

Lolz :P

What was surprising was the amount of weddings Father Joe was booked for. His wedding calendar was packed!! He was doing something like six weddings per weekend and he's already booked for thirty weddings next year! And all this time I was thinking he only does masses on weekends. When we left around 8pm, he told me us he had two more wedding appointments that evening!

Tough life!

Ramen & couch

We barely had time to enjoy our new relationship status when all of a sudden we're thrust into this whole wedding organising business.

And its quite a crazy business!

Gotta organise the priest then the church then venue then the limo then the DJ.

Mind you, we don't mind doing all of this, its just that it would be nice to enjoy our engagement without having to worry about deadlines and seating arrangements? and wedding songs?! and flowers and stuff.

Its actually just last Friday (3 weeks after the engagement) that we were able to sit and enjoy a meal together as fiance and fiance.

We had instant ramen! So tasty and so MSG gooood! Anh did well by adding broccoli and chicken to make it gourmet.

Good times.

Speaking of good times, we finally got our couch!

We thought it looked weird when we first got it (as shown in picture).

We went back to the store to complain on how it looks, only to find from the display model that we got the chase cushion the wrong way around!

Duh!

The Proposal

You just know

when you know.

And I know I love her

and

I can't wait for the rest of my life with her.

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OMG!!!

HOW DO I DO THIS?!!

DO YOU GUYS KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO PROPOSE THESE DAYS?!!!

Do you know how much PRESSURE there is to make it really special?!!! IT'S INSANE!?!!

Everything has to be perfect. Like perfect - perfect!!!

The ring, how its done, the scene - ALL HAS TO BE SUPER DUPER SPECIAL!

Like Big Mac 'special sauce' special?

No. More like how-you-proposed-will-be-told-to-everyone-including-your-neighbour's-great-great-great grandchildren special.

So not only must it blow the socks off of her, but it needs to impress five generations thereafter! Talk about pressure!!

It needs to be sweet, romantic, sentimental and funny (all the typically girly requirements which of course is nearly impossible to do).

It's crazy!! This world has gone nuts I tell you.

Nuts.

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Three.

Four.

One.

or

Twelve?!!! WTFBBQ?!!

These are the month's salary I've been told I needed to save up for the engagement ring. I was like *choke* THAT MUCH?!!!! for an engagement ring?!!!

HOLY $&1)#!

Hahahaha

*DEEP SIGH*

It's the first real test of your love :P

But I knew I couldn't propose without a ring. This was something I needed to do.

I also knew that buying diamonds is really tricky. You can get really burnt if you didn't know what you're doing.

So I made sure I did a lot of research. I googled diamonds and learnt about the four C's. But most helpful was reading pages and pages of the Vogue forums. To catch a fish you need to think like fish!! Hehehe.

I also went on James-Bond-espionage-spy mode. I spied on her jewelery box when she wasn't looking (it wasn't hard, I've raided her underwear drawer many times). I checked the

type of rings she had and measured her ring size (her ring size = my pinky finger size! yes!)

Taking these into consideration, I felt I had enough material to go into a ring store without feeling completely lost. Power through knowledge!!

One Friday afternoon, I went to Tiffany's, Hardy Brother's and Rosendorff in the city. I think I spent a good half an hour on each store talking to staff and having a good look at what they had on display.

What made it easy was I knew exactly what I wanted, a beautiful solitary ring (to symbolise my one love.... awwwww.......)

The guy at Tiffany's was really nice. Really helpful and was really professional. I saw a ring there that I liked (I swear I heard music when I saw the ring).

Hardy Brother's were expensive. Even more than Tiffany's for a similar ring. Plus they made me join their email list which was very evil of them. Not a fan of the all-black interior look either.

The lady who helped me in Rosendorff was the best. She was very excited about my engagement and was very pleased to hear what style of ring I was pursuing. I actually liked what she suggested but when she started offering discounts for it, alarm bells started ringing. Suddenly I

wasn't very sure if I was getting a good deal or not.

But I didn't decide straight away.

I sat on a decision for two more weeks and I passed the shops a few more times.

In the end it came down to what felt right.

It was simple, it was beautiful, it was perfect.

The song by Deep Blue Something was one of the first guitar songs I learnt.

*******************

Taylor Swift's song Love Story is the inspiration for my proposal.

Its a cute love song and I really like it! Its about love, its got Romeo and Juliet (for which my girlfriend has seen the movie a gazillion times, drooling all over Leonardo).

But the song's best part is the surprise proposal in the end! The music turns slow and melancholic.... which then builds pace and then BAM!!! HE KNELT TO THE GROUND AND PULLED OUT A RING!! Great finish!

I wanted to use this to spring my surprise proposal :P

I was contemplating singing the song and popping the question in the end.

Last time I sang for her on the guitar she was in tears, either she liked it or it was really bad. But to play the guitar and sing, knowing a proposal was to happen in the end sounded risky! She'd pick it from my voice that something was up.

Plus my Taylor Swift voice is VERY unromantic.

Maybe I'd propose by YouTube? Pre-record a song then post it on YouTube? Then we watch the video and pop the question right in the end?! Awesome!!!! :P

Very nerdy though :(

But the idea of a video proposal did grow on me :)

I thought about it a lot more and after much brainstorming I decided to match the cute song with a cute cartoon clip that I'd make.

Now I've done some cartoon sketching a long long time ago, so I was really rusty with my drawings.

To make a whole video required a lot of work. The whole exercise took four nights of brainstorming, sketching and storyboard planning. And it took a full day to put it all together.

I made a total of 140 animation cells for the video

In the end I finished with a very cute proposal video clip.

I'm really quite pleased with how it turned out.

It was cute, romantic, sentimental and special.

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We had breakfast at Monza that cloudy Sunday morning.

We both ordered dishes with eggs covered in Hollandaise sauce.

How come something so bad could be so good!

The big breakfast got us completely stuffed and so we went to Kings park to walk it off.

Kings park was beautiful that day.

All the flowers had bloom.

There were colours everywhere.

She was in a happy mood that morning (because I've fed her and she's had her coffee hehehe). and were sharing jokes and talking about random things.

Like what we always do.

After going down and up the Kokoda track, we found ourselves a tree to rest under.

We had a view overlooking the city.

The sun had come up and just being under the cool shade was really nice.

It was perfect.

*****************************

On the 18th of October, 2009, under the shade of a tree,

I proposed to her.

After she wiped away the tears, she said yes.