Marriage redux

After three months and a week of being married, we figured it was time for another party, so we booked the outside deck on a bar in Wan Chai. It's November now and the weather is starting to cool, so we figured it would be a pleasant, balmy night.

Just as with our wedding, our estimate of the weather was a bit off, as Hong Kong cranked the heat back up to 30 degrees and we were sweltering in our Canada-weight clothing. I missed a trick here: I should have insisted that everyone else dressed formally too, so we could share in the joy of dehydration.

It was a lovely night, full of happy people and cupcakes. The bar has some projectors set up that usually show football matches, and we had the bar play the photos from the wedding through them instead. Since the projectors used the exterior walls of the adjacent buildings as their screens, it meant we were beaming pictures of our marriage across Wan Chai, which is a little inappropriate. You're meant to go to Wan Chai to produce a disaster in your married life, not to commemorate the start of it.

Still, I wondered if I might be inserted subliminally into the minds of the patrons of The Old China Hand, The Doghouse and The Last Refuge Of The Dirty Old Man. In years to come, a sweaty man with a combover and a dubious understanding of sexual ethics may find himself thinking of a man in a cream suit, standing on a boat, and he won't know why.

After four hours of looking smart and being given presents, I was exhausted, so I fled home, laden with champagne bottles and picture frames, and then returned, changed into less formal attire. "Dressed like a gay cyberpunk" as somebody put it, which I felt wasn't quite correct; I didn't have a digital watch implanted into my forehead, and anyone can wear a v-neck t-shirt that displays their sternum. Whether anyone should or not is a quite different matter, and not one to address here. Maybe next week I'll dress as a fey ciderdrunk.

We didn't last much beyond the costume change: I got outside of one more beer (San Miguel, which doesn't have the same dire consequences as Stella Artois) and a couple of shots of a unidentified bright green liquid, and then woke up this morning fairly discombobulated, surrounded by an embarassment of riches. Not a bad way to spend the weekend.