The Wedding Dinner

The formalities over, we returned to the limo to go to a restaurant to celebrate our wedding.  After some deliberation, none of which included me, although the expectation was I should pay, they decided to go to Ubon Ratchathani’s plush lakeside restaurants.  This turned out to be a great choice.  The weather was dull but warm, the restaurant quiet but friendly and the company was relaxed and happy.

The menu was in Thai, so I just left them to it.  We ordered drinks and I was a little surprised that Khamma’s cousin and the village leader order a whiskey each.  There was a slight delay as a waitress scurried round to the next restaurant to ‘borrow’ a bottle, but otherwise we started to ‘unwind’ from our ‘not so wound up’ morning.  

In the meanwhile, a small mystery was emerging in my mind, and that was the gender of our ‘waitress’.  I was not sure, but it seemed likely that she was not a she, but a he pretending to be a she.  Unfortunately, in my opinion, he was not making a good job of it and the mystery unfolding in my mind was ‘Why is he bothering?’  There are a high proportion of male Thai teenagers thinking they are girls, and it is widely accepted amongst their family and public.  I suppose that if a girl is trapped in a man’s body, then there has to be a presence of mind for its release.  It is quite usual in Thailand to see boys dressing up as a girl and their siblings ploughing the fields or catching snakes and frogs.  I decided to take Khamma’s advice and declare my position as ‘up to them’ and returned to continue enjoying the excellent feast being laid before us.

The food was delicious and it was either eaten or put into a doggy bag for later.  The total cost was 1,200 bhat which is roughly £24 – for five people though!

We drove back to Thamuang where I discovered that the leader had somehow acquired the bottle of whisky.  I would have been annoyed but it was only the 100 Pipers brand!

So we returned to Owerrrouse as husband and wife (Poor and Mia – in Thai phonetics; guess who is Poor? Yes you are correct – it’s me).  Khamma started doing something and I started reading a book.  Nothing seemed to have changed, so I decided to go and see Billy an ex-pat friend in the next village. 

I was now husband to Khamma and she was my wife.  I could never have predicted I would fall so much in love with a girl from Thailand, and Khamma could never have seen her future with a farang such as me.  But ‘That’s it’.
So we are very happy together and unlike most weddings, it cost next to nothing. A good result for Saddleworth man, do you agree?