The Wedding: The ceremony definitely is my fav part of the day (1)
Aug 17th, 2009 by Diar A.
After a week of craziness at home, the D day eventually came. Sunday, July 19, 2009 would be in my heart, always (and no, it isn’t April).
It is a common thing in my city, Pontianak, to have the groom came to the ceremony site right from his family residence. He actually only rented three cars, but it turned out that more members of the family joined with their own vehicles.
Another common thing is that the groom and his family must walk a little bit to the ceremony site. The little mosque that was designated as our ceremony site has a huge parking lot, but since the groom’s group had to walk, they parked farther.
This is them, getting ready to walk a few hundred meters or so, and that’s the groom, wearing all white (I’ll talk about the outfits on another post):
Maybe you don’t see clearly, but the guys in blue with pink Malay sarong behind the groom and who are holding tambourines were from a traditional tambourine group or something (I don’t know the term) that my husband rented only for that occasion. It is a custom for grooms to be accompanied by sounds of tambourines
when they come to the wedding ceremony site.
And the two decorated wooden sticks behind (those are actually Boy Scout sticks) are traditional decorations in weddings. A pineapple is embed at the top of the big stick and smaller sticks already decorated with colored papers are embed in the pineapple. Children attending the ceremony took them to play with, but I don’t know what happened with the pineapple. Eaten, maybe?
Below is the scene where my family and neighbors welcomed the groom and his family in the mosque next to my parents’ house:
You can see there are two guys from the groom’s side bringing in another kind of traditional wedding decor. They are called egg trees, as eggs (boiled ones, still with the shells) are embed in each of the fake flower stem stuck in a stick. Children and adult took them until nothing was left except the place of the trees. They are made from velvet wrapped plant pots and sticks (my husband asked someone to make them, and later we found out that it would be rented to another groom, and to the next groom, and the cycle goes on).
You can also see in the above picture, there’s my aunt next to the mosque pillar holding a bowl containing yellow rice. It is a custom in weddings in my country to welcome the groom and his family by tossing yellow rice (usually the rice is colored with turmeric). I don’t know what happened then with the tossed rice, but as far as I noticed, the complex was always full of birds. So hopefully, birds ate those rice.
While all those scenes happened, I was still ‘hidden’ in the house, waiting until I was called. So yes, the ceremony was started without me. This is a usual thing in Muslim weddings, as a gesture that we’re not yet ‘official’ as husband and wife. But when the groom was about to take the marriage of the bride, my step mom (in blue gown below) and my sister-in-law (in white and holding her daughter) came to pick me up to the mosque. My two good friends who accompanied me since I was getting ready, helped me with the long batik skirt. I actually hoped for something more dramatic in my walking to the mosque, but well then, this was also fine 
In part 2 of this post, I’ll talk about how the ceremony went on. I didn’t say “I do” and neither the groom did. Well, we said something else. Stay tuned 
[The first two photos were taken by our professional photographer, the last one by the bride's friend]