another wedding dinner.

It's a law in China that when you get married, you get time off work. The length of time depends on your age; Tony and I are each entitled to one week off. Luckily, T's boss gave him 4 weeks off(!!!) with a catch; he told Tony we had to host a wedding dinner before we left for Canada. 

So, a couple weeks ago, T and I invited some of our friends and all of his colleagues to dinner at a Teppanyaki restaurant. We ate and drank and laughed and it was a lot of fun!

All of the photos below are straight from Melissa and Alanna's phones. 

It's not exactly "normal" to host a wedding dinner—especially a Chinese wedding dinner—at a Teppanyaki restaurant, but we thought it would be the easiest to accommodate almost 30 guests on short-ish notice and not a huge budget.

We're lucky to call Melissa our friend. She came to our "China wedding" too!

While everyone was eating, we went around the table to thank our guests for coming. It's customary to do a toast with each guest. I took a sip of beer every "cheers," but Tony drank his whole glass each time because the guests would say, "Gānbēi" —a toast that is like "cheers!" and "drink it all."

The guests also gave us hóngbāo. I remember being scandalized that Melissa and Alanna snuck a photo ;) 

In the above three photos, T is translating something to one of his best friends, Li Hui, for me. Something along the lines of, "Thank you for coming. Thank you for being such a good friend to Tony. Thank you for making me feel welcome right from the beginning. And thank you for buying us..." (I'll let you fill in the blank ;) 

By this time, T had toasted with almost everyone, haha!

It was at this point, while toasting Alanna, that I got teary-eyed. We've been together for our entire China adventure up to this point. We met Tony on our first full day in Beijing, and both commented (just to each other!) about how cute he was. If we had known then...

And then... for some reason... T's boss had us get up on these chairs and kiss. 

The other customers loved it and Melissa took a photo of them taking photos of us.

I think this is our last wedding event until our official wedding in New Brunswick! Eep!

P.S. Our save the dates and my bachelorette weekend in Hong Kong.