Speaking of Wedding Dinners ...

If you're Chinese, you tend to attend wedding dinners, as opposed to actual weddings, which is more of a Christian thing nowadays. There are the occasional few non-Christian ones where we get to join in the bride collection process (corrupted by tricks learned from Hongkie serials), but invites to those have been almost zero since I got married (Married guys don't qualify, you see).

Over the years, wedding dinners have been a blur of the same things - the long wait, the happy couple's entrance, the salty food, the Powerpoint presentation, the Kenny G music, but there were occasions when I got something different:-

1. Best food - my wife's ex-room mate's dinner in Kampar back in 2002. The ikan bawal was to die for. A distant second was JW Marriott KL, 2004 - distant cousin's wedding - he didn't have too many relatives in KL and I had to make up the numbers.

2. Longest wait - another of my wife's ex-room mate, in Federal Hotel 2001. We started dinner at 9.15 pm and finished at 11.30! I wanna see someone else beat that.

3. Fastest dinner - the same one that won the best food award. Started sharp at 6 pm, finished sharp 8 pm. Who says quality has to take time?

4. Most punctual - and Kampar wins again! Yay!

5. Most environmentally friendly - Klang 2004. This ex-colleague of mine actually put a note on every table explaining why they decided to replace the usual shark fin soup with herbal chicken soup instead.

6. Lousiest food - Hope my good friend and ex-colleague won't mind, but this has to be his hundred table banquet held at Palace of the Golden Horses in 2002. Everything was sloppily done.

7. Most expensive - 1000 bucks per table, see no. 6. Oh, the irony of it.

8. Best service - JW Marriott, distant cousin's dinner 2004. They struck the right balance between thoughtfulness and fussiness.

9. Best Powerpoint presentation - this has to be the two done by Simon, a good friend who did two very funny yet touching cartoons of the happy couples' stories. Way to go, Simon!

10. Best live presentation - a live rendition of one of Ah Niu's Hokkien songs to the happy couple, with modified lyrics, church friend's wedding, 2001.

11. Most drunken - The Gurney, Penang, 2000. After the dinner, the couple invited a group of 20 friends (yours truly included) to their suite to help themselves to two cases of hard liquor. No one was able to hold their food for the next two days.