the vengeful cow blog

Reza's Wedding

Posted by lara Sun, 24 Apr 2005 12:55:00 GMT

More pictures will have to come later, but we had a great time yesterday celebrating the wedding of our friend Reza. It was really neat to see some of the wedding traditions here. I am looking forward to looking through pictures with Reza and his wife so that they can explain to us better what was going on. But here's what I got out of it:

We started out at the groom's house. His family fed us breakfast as everyone gathered together. They had gifts for the bride's family that they were putting together to give to them as a sort of bride price. The groom was dressed in an Indonesian outfit.

From there we went to the mosque. They found some chairs for us and some others outside the mosque so that we could see what was going on. We didn't understand much, but it was interesting to watch. They all took off their shoes and sat on the floor for the ceremony, with the men on one side and the women on the other. There wasn't any music except for some chanted prayers. One of our Muslim friends borrowed our camera and brought it inside, so hopefully we got some good pictures and can get a better view from the pictures on our camera. :-)

Then after the mosque, we went to the reception at the bride's family's house. The bride and groom changed into traditional Acehnese outfits. A group of men ate in one room (including the village leaders), a group of the women ate in another, and then the rest of the people all ate outside. Since I don't speak Indonesian, I ate in the men's eating room with the rest of the PACTEC guys. It felt somewhat odd for me to be the only woman in that circle, but they didn't seem to mind. Everyone sat on the floor, and they had SO MUCH food spread out all through the middle of the floor, with all of the people sitting around it. The bride and groom sat at the head of the "table" in the men's room. The walls of the house were covered in fabric, and they had created what looked like almost a throne for the bride and groom. It was quite impressive-looking.

So all in all, we felt very honored that Reza and his wife would invite us to their wedding, and we had a great time.