Big Wedding

Posted 12.10pm
This Wednesday, 18th April 2007, Altaa and I were invited to a society wedding, where a big-cheese Mongolian film-maker's daughter was getting married. Inconveniently, it in the middle of the day in the middle of the week, but we still made it. The wedding itself was a private affair, held in the Wedding Palace, but we went to the reception. This was held in the main hall of the five-star Ulaanbaatar Hotel. I had no idea how grand it would be and so was glad that we had bought as a wedding present a gas-fired stove (that I could carry) for 55,500 tugrugs. We put the present in the ger (traditional tent) that had been erected in the hall to one side. The settings were majestically opulent. I partook of four different alcohol drinks that were on our table - fine Mongolian vodka, red Bordeaux wine, Budver Budweiser (Czech) and red label Johnnie Walker whiskey. The latter is usually mass-produced in China while sold as authentic, but this was the real thing, even with its Kilmarnock post code, let alone where it was being served.
The newly wed bride, bulge of a second baby on the way prominent, arrived with her husband after about one hour after the invitation stated we should come. The entertainment was lavish, with many famous Mongolian musicians performing on the stage, which ironically in all this splendour looked like it had been mocked up for a Sunday school nativity play, with its gold paper stuck to walls and swishy curtains. The pick for me was Nuans - a band that specialises in the synergy of pop and opera or Popera - and in their repertoire that they sang was a classically rendered, Mongolian-language version of Toni Braxton's Unbreak My Heart and followed that up with Faure's Pavane with an underlying guitar rythym and occasional backbeat.
As we sat at the table, we were served with a three-course meal. There were many speeches by the family of both bride and groom. The brother of the groom pledged a wedding gift of 1 billion tugrugs, before realising that was beyond his means and scaling it back to 100 million tugrugs (he confused 999, million with 99 million, perhaps intentionally). Altaa noticed that I was only one of two foreigners present, so I did indeed feel privileged. There were also three former Miss Mongolias there; I don't if these were them, but two women with their glamorous ball gowns reminded me of Natasha and her friend in Tolstoy's War And Peace where they make their ball debut in society. Along with all the multitude of guests we retrieved our gift from the ger and went up to give it to the couple at the end.