As you can see, I'm not a very bridezilla kind of bride, you can even say that i'm way at the other end of the spectrum (i suspect i may be even more chill than zh abt her wedding). To me, the best part abt planning a wedding is firstly, the excuse to go on a expensive long holiday ie. the honeymoon, and, the pre-wedding shoot. But i do want to note down some parts of the wedding process and I definitely, definitely want to record our househunting process (for the reasons stated above).
So for chronology sake, I thought I'd just blog abt the pre-wedding shoot first, skip the nitty-gritty wedding planning details all together then jump straight onto the house-hunting part. (I'm also gonna skip the proposal story since most of you know it already and SOME of you even embellished it quite a bit).
Anyway, you know that my pre-wedding photoshoot has been done already, like way before the actual planning for the wedding. i blame it entirely on the lousy leave system of my previous posting.
You see, initially Liang and I had saved up and planned for a 2 week New Zealand trip and i had even begged Sm for her itinerary and planned out the entire road trip route and hotels when I found out that my leave which I requested for in march has been rejected and 14 days of leave has been given to me in january instead. Since there is a policy of 'take-it-or-leave-it-and-dont-expect-me-to-give-you-another-day' instituted by the leave monster, i took the leave indeed.
However, because it's holiday period for the locals then, hotels/rentals/everything prices rose by more than 1.5 to 2 times. We decided to forego New Zealand, and Liang suggested going Taiwan again. So i thought, might as well use the new zealand budget and settle our wedding photography there too, sort of like a working holiday.
Liang was for the idea, so i started my research with one major obstacle. Most of the taiwan bridal studios have their websites in traditional chinese and their only way of communication to them is via email! (which i assume needs to be written in chinese too??) So not having much of a choice we went into the only singapore based Taiwan shop who very importantly can do all the liasing for us, spoke to someone there for an hour, saw their gorgeous photos and paid the deposit after much much bargaining. Thereby saving Liang from the ordeal of what most bridegrooms must go through: the dreary trudge through all the studios of Tanjong pagar road.
It was a really fun and unique experience, the photoshoot. We settled everything in 3 days. 1st day - gown choosing, with help from their really chio and cute assistants. 1st day evening - meet up with photographer, called Lin-Sir who told us not to drink water that night and then in his next breath gave us tourist info and directions to a nearby night food street. Very conflicting. 2nd day- photoshoot. 3rd day- choose photos. Rest of the trip - tour around taiwan.
On the day of the shoot we had to wake up really early and for some reason, I was feeling quite nervous so only managed to gobble down half of a sandwich and some soup. Then it was the long long process of hair and makeup, during which i had a nice chat w the MUA and her assistants (there were 2-3 pple working on me at once) and they complimented me on my good command of chinese *smug look directed at Liang, who fell asleep prob because he was too bored and couldn't contribute much to our conversation due to his inferior chinese muahaha*
When I jerk him awake an hour later, I had on full makeup and my hair looking like Medusa's in rollers. He took a bleary look at my face and gave quite a frightened start. Hmmph... quite insulting, i tell you.
We then hired a cab for the day and our first stop was this huge park that had ponds and hills, forests and parks. And I really learnt to appreciate the magic of the camera. I mean, we can be standing on a man made footpath over-looking an obviously man made pond, but Lin-Sir and his assistant, who is called XiaoZhi (too cute lar all these taiwanese names) constructed a swing from a tree branch in 10min and they managed to make it look all natural and fairytale like. There was this shot where we were basically at this tiny lavender grass patch in the middle of a business district next to the mrt station, and he actually managed to make it look like a huge lavender field. Amazing!
And by basically following his instructions blindly, like "hold her hand like this, and "look at him like that" and "look at the ground" "look at that tree and smile" "look at XiaoZhi's hand" while I'm thinking 'why the heck am i smiling lovingly at somebody's hand", we actually managed to take alot of great shots.
After what felt like a million shots and getting in and out of the cab a hundred times to go to different small areas of the park, we went back to the studio, where i was immediately shooed into stuffing myself into a very tight corsetted 2nd gown. Then while working on my hair and make up again, they gave us a delicious looking bento which I unfortunately couldn't eat much of, due to an extremely tight dress and sitting ramrod straight for the MUA doing my hair.
The weather was holding up pretty good, since the sun was out and even though it was supposed to be winter, it was actually warm enough to be prancing around in evening gowns.
And so the day continued with more cab rides, more gown and hair change.
Until our second last venue of the day which was supposed to be 'sunset at the beach'. Gorgeous scenery, but it was starting to get cold. So it was a matter of wrapping myself up in a shawl that they prepared for me, hiding behind Catechol from the very strong seabreeze, then when Lin-Sir had the perfect angle, run to the spot, smile, try not to shiver too much, and then run back again to XiaoZhi and the shawl.
By this time, I am getting extremely tired, had a splitting headache from the cold wind and was feeling rather car sick, so it was a grumpy me during the last gown change stop in the studio. I was feeling too ill to speak to Catechol even though he kept smiling at me cos I was looking very 'bride-like' in a proper wedding gown with veil.
After a number of studio shots i was bundled again in the shawl to be brought to the last photoshoot venue, which was 'Night scene at Love River' (i requested for a night scene cos I thought it would look quite romantic, boy did i regret my decision).
Accompanied by encouraging words from passersby like 'Jia you! Xin1 niang2 must be very cold', and 'Xin Niang hen3 piao4 liang4. jia you' , I braved the winter air in my thin gown but you could tell the smile was certainly strained. And during the cab ride, I just felt so sick and nauseous, be it from the numerous car rides or the tight gowns that i've been wearing the whole day, the moment I reached the studio I just ran into the toilet and threw up every pathetic thing I ate the whole day including my breakfast. My theory is that my gowns were so tight that it was impossible for peristalsis to occur.
Very much later, after we had finished the process of choosing our photos, Catechol commented that because they know our AD date is more than one year away, and I kept asking them if there's any way of photoshopping tummies and fats (sadly no) and my episode of vomiting, they may suspect that there might be *ahem* another reason behind my predicament.
Anyway, despite all that, I really had fun and we ended up with a really gorgeous set of photos.
You must be thinking now, "I got conned into reading this whole lengthy, boring, wordy post and there's not even a single wedding photo to see?!!!"
Sorry folks, no revealing of photos till the actual day. In fact to date, only my parents, his mum, 2 relatives and ...... Wk has seen the album! And only because she offered to send me home from dinner in exchange for seeing the album (you could also say that she kidnapped me).
So see ya at the wedding.. grinz
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