A Khmer wedding
Hello again!
It has been a few days since I visited my first Khmer Wedding. It seems people in Cambodia want as many guests as possible on their weddings (most probably since every guest donates a certain amount of money for the bride couple) otherwise I don´t know why I got invited. Actually I had never met the couple getting married before the ceremony. I got the invitation through The Goodwill School and of course I thought it would be interesting to experience so I accepted the invitation.
At 07.00 we met with the groom close to the brides house where everyone got a piece of fruit, food, drink, flower etc to carry to the brides house. Reaching the brides house the item was collected and a soup served as breakfast. Then the bridal couple and their close family spent the day and I went home. What kind of ceremony was taking part during the day, I unfortunately have no idea.
In the afternoon (always at least 2 hours after the official invitation time) I was picked up by Lungdy, who works at The Goodwill School and we went to the Hotel where the ceremony was taking place. We were shown to a table and once the table was full we were served several courses of different Khmer meals along with beers. Most of the time the music was so loud it wasn't possible to a have a conversation around the table, which in this case didn't make that much difference for me since most of the guests around the table only spoke Khmer. Instead we were eating, smiling and making toasts with the beers. During the dinner I wondered what happened with all the trash because I didn't see anyone collecting anything from the table but as you can see on one of the pictures below I figured it out.
After dinner a cake was of cut and thereafter a bit of dancing. Around 21.15, perhaps after 30 minutes of dancing, I noticed that a lot of people went out to the front yard of the place. I thought there were something happening out there and Lungdy told me we were going out. To my surprise it showed nothing special was happening but instead the people were leaving and so did we. A very abrupt and surprising end to the ceremony I must say. Well, I had a great time and a quite different wedding experience. Here are a some pictures from the day, enjoy!
