Wow... What have I just been through the last few days... I'm a bit overwhelmed.

It's the Chinese Mid-Autumn festival where we get a week off, although not really because public holidays are kind of fake here in that you have to make up the lost days by working weekends. So a 7-day work week is coming up next. Joy.

Anyway, while most people shipped themselves off to exotic places to take selfies to make sure people think their lives are amazing thereby perpetuating global social insecurities, me and the fiancé were instead shipped off to some little towns to attend her cousin's wedding to a strapping young lad I'd met once before.

In all my time in China, I had never actually attended a wedding, so this was in a sense a great opportunity for me to see some traditional action, although my mentality was certainly not in the mood for it. I had a terrible night sleep before the 5-hour bullet train journey, followed by no sleep on the train and then a 1.5-day long headache in extremely humid outdoors activities I'll talk about in another blog.

It just set the stage for me feeling pretty shitty the entire trip so just keep that in mind while I show you everything that happened, because in reality it was really quite magical and has given me a lot of food for thought regarding tradition, family, nationalism and more, which I'm still digesting now I'm home on my sofa with the cats who seemed barely to notice I've been gone for 4 days.

Typical.

The Province: JiangXi 江西 ______________ The City: GongQing 共青

As you can see, it's a pretty non-descript location. With a population of 220,000, it's one of the smaller places I've visited, given 'small towns' here can be bigger than any city in the UK outside of London.

This was certainly no tourist location. I had once again become a strange, white alien to the locals, with every passerby dropping a second glance, adults and children alike gawping at me and commenting '外国人!' - Foreigner! Something I had once experience daily in South Korea, but living in Shanghai I'm not even worth noticing - just how I like it. Although the novelty of being a white monkey again I must admit was pretty fun (but also a bit annoying at times).

Ok now I've set the stage of my mood and my location, let's get into this pretty surreal wedding experience.

The Wedding

The amount of tradition going on in this wedding, though I only experienced a portion of it, was absurd. And to be honest, I found it very wholesome and though I never had a wedding myself, I felt a little envious that a lot of the Western traditions are fading away alongside the slow death of organised religion.

In the hotel we were all staying, we dropped in on the room the bride was sitting in wait for the groom, dressed in gorgeous traditional garb on the bed, bridesmaids all dressed up with her. Guests such as ourselves actually had no requirement here and most just wore what they'd normally wear.

The goal here was to simply await the arrival of the Groom. The bridesmaids at the door are tasked with gatekeeping, giving him some questions about his Bride that he must answer before he can enter, such as what is her birthday on the Lunar Calendar, what's the last 4 digits of her National ID card. If he can't answer, he has to slip red packets through the door crack until he gets enough right that he can enter. The red packets, as is standard in pretty much everything celebratory in China, is to be stuffed with paper money.

Once he's allowed entry, a whole palaver happens with cheers and laughter, and a series of new tasks commence. They're all a whole bunch of fun. The bride, still on the bed, rolled a die and unveiled what he must do such as:

• Ten push-ups
• Figure out the emoji-coded messages on paper
• Apply lipstick to his 'groomsmaids' blinded
• Wear balloon antlers and try to catch a bunch of tossed red rings on them
• Find the missing shoe somewhere in the hotel room

After this, he had to get on his knee and make his vows, as well as to his parents sitting on the sofa where he'd offer them each a cup of green tea, which they would show approval of the marriage by drinking it.

This being over, was only the beginning.

It was now time to head out, and we were immediately greeted with some Chinese musicians outside the hotel playing their cacophonous banging and wailing as the bride and groom entered their car. We got in one of the 10 other cars and headed towards a temple in their hometown village about 20 minutes away where they light a candle to the sound of the clanging music following them everywhere, and a mass of daytime fireworks.

Next, to their ancestor's home, where we would all enter and follow a similar ritual of attending the local temple and getting approval with green tea of their grandparent's, before going to the partner's home to do the same.

After hanging out in the latter for a while for chit-chat, admiring the bed covered in fruit and/or nuts spelling out a message in Chinese to have healthy children,, we went off to the next destination...

The Actual Wedding

This was a bit more modern and western, though with a series of twists. Here, the bride adorned a typical white wedding gown, and we were in a large hall with music and lunch on roundtables. There was an overwhelming number of 'family' on both sides, amounting to several hundred people. These families, despite the whole one-child policy, were commonly built from 6-7 siblings at each level, so the multiplier factor was pretty insane, especially coming from my background of having basically a mum and a sister.

_{ALL FAMILY WTF}

As I said - but cannot emphasise enough - by comparison to what I'm used to, this was overwhelming.

Some things you might expect happen here, with some speeches and such, but then the groom came up on stage and sang a song which I thought was pretty brave, before the both of them spoke their official teary vows and the deed was done.

This was followed by... something I never expected would happen to me.

The bridesmaids and 'groomsmaids' got on stage to catch the bouquet of flowers thrown backwards by the bride, just like the western tradition, which is to say whoever catches it, is next. It was a bit odd then, when the married couple forced MY FIANCE AND I up on stage too, as this is meant to be for the single ladies out there - We are already engaged and so this was not exactly a requirement!

But holy cow there we were waiting. My fiance refused to catch it and squeezed her way to the back but... almost as if planned by her cousin, the chaos and confusion had her holding her hands up in the air and her head down as if to protect herself from damage, only to find the bouquet miraculously in her hands moments later, and hundreds of obscure relatives applauding the both of us.

Holy Cripes.

Next we were each made to give an impromptu speech. A nightmare. Not only is my Chinese far from fluent making the idea of improvising a speech impossible, but I didn't even know these people - what could I even say?

Panic-stricken and lost for words, the host suggested I simply use English. This didn't exactly help because I didn't have any words in any language, and my nerves meant that my capacity to speak English became about as bad as in Chinese.

I think I ultimately muddled across a message along the lines of

You guys are really inspiring and look amazing, I only hope we can be as happy as you two when the time comes

Albeit with broken grammar and failed structure. In English. With a congrats in Chinese which was received with roaring applause as you might expect from a white monkey novelty such as myself.

God.

The rest of the time there was to continue eating, and drinking lots of Baijiu 白酒， a sort of paint-thinner masquerading as alcohol that all Chinese drink each other under the table with.

Thanks to my very existence being a novelty to the majority there, there was plenty of attention on me to drink and cheer and be invited to various hometowns, so needless to say I got pretty darn drunk before the sun reached its highest point in the sky.

Long story short, we went back to the hotel where I passed out for a while before dizzyingly embarking on the long, painful journey home by means of a 1 hour slow train, a 2 hour wait, and then another 4-5 hours on a bullet train, followed by a taxi trip back home from Shanghai Railway station.

We got into bed somewhere after 2am by which point I had fully recovered from the paint thinner.

For better context, need I remind you that the 2 days before I had suffered from a lack of sleep and a burning headache the entire duration, only to be met with a drunken hangover as I spent 6 hours traveling on public transport.

It's odd how being there at the time felt so miserable, and yet thinking back to it all merely a day later, it feels so oddly fond.

Coming from such a broken family background, I felt like I was living through the eyes of a totally different person with this huge, accepting family. Sure, a lot of them had their attention on me because of how different I was, but it was all kindness, with invites to barbecue, drinks and various hometowns, it was like there was no prerequisite in order to become part of the already oversized family.

The groom himself drove over specifically to come with us to the train station to help with our bags, and at least 15 family members were waving at us through the window after hugs and handshakes as we drove off. It was totally unreal when I've been brought up in such a toxic lifestyle of bickering and fighting, children being taken away from their parents and lawyers, ultimately with every family member being estranged and physically separated by hundreds or even thousands of miles.

I guess now I've committed to life, this family is technically mine in the end, and I'll have to get used to it!