Jan 07 2009
Remembering My Wedding
A friend of mine has updated her status on FaceBook recently and I found out that she is getting married. Her husband-to-be also works in a hotel as F&B Manager. As I was browsing through her happy entries, I was surprised to see their photos on holiday in a different country on Christmas Eve.
Everyone in the hotel industry, including hotel wives, knows that Christmas and New Year belong to the busiest season for hotels. The occupancy is high. The restaurants are full with in-house guests and local guests. There are special menus to be planned, activities to be arranged, and a lot of unforgiving guests to be entertained. I don’t remember a single Christmas or New Year’s Eve that J did not work. As the first wife, I also have to show up at all important parties and functions during the festive season.
We see less of our husbands during these universal holidays for the rest of the world. But most of us understand this is the nature of the business. Some of the wives are less understanding. The wife of J’s hotel manager took their two daughters back to her parents’ home for a month, from December 8 to January 8, citing he would be working non-stop anyway. He was left alone and not feeling too jolly at all.
For my friend’s fiancé to be on holiday with her during Christmas is beyond my hospitality comprehension. I sure hope he had his boss’s approval otherwise my friend is marrying to a man who will be looking for a new job pretty soon.
That reminded me of my wedding. We were living in South East Asia then and it was a very religious society. Cohabitation of a man and a woman without marriage is frowned upon. I was lucky enough to be extended the full benefits of a wife from the hotel J worked in. When we moved to another hotel company and another city, we decided to make everything legitimate.
At that time I was helping J with some consulting work at his hotel restaurant. (I used to work in a hotel.) We found out that getting married in that country was extremely difficult with many documents to be obtained and certifications to be notarized. With our hectic schedules at the hotel we simply could not spare the time for such a ‘trivial’ matter.
We eventually found out that getting married in Hong Kong was very easy. We submitted our names and application. The marriage registrar posted our application on a notice board for a week to see anyone would protest. Luckily no one knew us in Hong Kong to protest. A week later the registrar chose a date for us and we flew in for a ceremony and that was it.
We had planned to do it quietly but we were afraid that our parents would be angry after they found out. So we invited our parents and my brother to fly in to Hong Kong for that half of an hour ceremony. They treated it like a holiday trip with a special purpose. A couple of fancy meals and many bottles of champagne later, we parted our ways and went to work.
Our main reason to be in Hong Kong was to source some Oriental style fabric for our new restaurant. That took us searching high and low in crowded and noisy alleys of Hong Kong. Our nuptial luggage was stuffed with yards of silk and embroidery. We had to exchange for a bigger suitcase with my brother with all the supplies.
Did our general manager at the time thank us or appreciate our efforts? Hell no. He did, however, ask us to conveniently pick up an expensive photo album from a designer store for him and when we declined his reimbursement for the photo album out of politeness, he was only too happy to drop the matter of over $200 altogether.
Back at the hotel in less than five days, J and I, now bonded legally as one entity, went right back into our work on the restaurant. The marriage was, after all, a piece of paper of convenience. But our love, now eight years later, is stronger than ever. Our anniversary is next week. And we have moved four destinations in four continents since.
