I finally am going to blog about the rest of the wedding we went to in China on March 26! After the first half of the wedding, the girls went to our ayi's house for the remainder of the afternoon and dinner while Alex and I stayed at the party and restaurant dinner for the wedding celebration.
Here are some more pics of the wedding:
Girls in qipaos:
The wedding entourage coming down the street:
They had two dragons, each consisting of two people, performing dances before the bride's carriage:
The bride came in veiled and all in red:
The big unveiling! She's so beautiful! The woman on the right was Linda, the MC for the event:
After the ceremony, Magdalena kept tracking down people with cameras - I guess she is used to people to take her picture now - goes for them before they even come to her!
Around 2:30 our ayi, Juanzi, picked the girls up with our driver Chen and her daughter to take them to her house. She had her two older sisters, her younger sister, her mother, her mother's sister, and some friends helping her (or just stopping by to see the girls!). We gave her our camera so she could take pictures of the afternoon, and I printed all of them out for her the next day. There are almost no pictures with her actually in them, as she was taking them the whole time.
I have to admit that I was keenly interested to see the inside of her house. I had never been in a real Chinese flat except the time I went with my friend Amy to pick up the stair stepper she bought through Jayland and it got delivered to someone's apartment - and that hardly counted since the person was single, not a family. Juanzi lives with her husband, her daughter, and her mother in a flat that she and her husband own outright. They bought before Kaifaqu became popular with the Free Trade Zone, so apparently got a good deal. But they have since sold the house they live in and bought a new one in a brand new apartment compound near Intel. However, since the places they buy are completely unfinished - just bare concrete walls - so they have to trim it out and paint it. She said that she thought she'd be in in August at one point, but the last time I asked she said it would probably be the end of the year.
Anyway, the place she lives in is a big compound of tall apartment complexes with little shops on the ground level, surely all owned by people who live there. A preschool lines the end of her building - that is where her daughter goes for 600 RMB per month (less than $100) for three meals, two snacks, and like 12 hours! Juanzi lives on the 6th floor of her building. There are two apartments on either side of the stairwell, but several stairwells in one building - maybe 6? So 12 units per floor, and like 8 or 10 floors - something like that.
So as not to appear rude, I did not gaze around the apartment as well as I would have liked, but I did notice that upon being let in by Juanzi's mom, we were ushered into what seemed like a big entryway/living room. To the left was a sliding door into a small kitchen. Straight back was a short hallway - probably a bathroom down there, not sure if there was another room back there, and to the right was the bedroom, also able to be isolated by a sliding door with translucent glass. The front room and the bedroom both had a double bed mattress in them, and in the bedroom there was a television and a side table where all the women who were left (two older sisters, Juanzi, and the mother) were baoing (folding) jaozi. One sister was feeding Magdalena and the other was feeding Lucia and Wang Nan (Juanzi's daughter), who were really more interested in playing with each other than eating! The television was on, but it was the news or something equally as boring - no kids shows and I didn't see a DVD player, so no movies. She also does not have a camera or a computer.
The walls were bare except for a few pictures of Wang Nan - her one year photo, and one Juanzi had done just this past winter when she turned three. Our Christmas family photo was tacked up in the corner of Wang Nan's one year picture.
Juanzi insisted that I sit for a few minutes while Magdalena finished eating. All the girls were wearing their jackets and warm clothes - since the floor heat had been turned off by the government a few weeks prior and they don't have a wall heater, their apartment had no heat. It wasn't exactly freezing inside, but it definitely was not warm. Juanzi had dressed Magdalena in some of Wang Nan's old clothes as apparently I hadn't dressed her warmly enough. There were some toys spread out on the bed, but my impression of the whole atmosphere was that it was quite spartan, bare, a bit dishabille, and bleak. However, everyone seemed to be in good moods and happy to have our girls there. As Alex is known to say, in China it is not about where you ARE, but rather about where you are GOING. And props to Juanzi and her husband for being so frugal as to own their house and buy a new one - they are moving up in the world.
This is the entryway room showing the kitchen in the background:
The front room bed - you can see the counter beyond the boxes in the room beyond:
Juanzi's older sister helping Lucia on the swing at her apartment complex
The front room again
They make jaozi in the "bedroom"
Thanks Juanzi for taking such good care of our girls!
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