Our wedding reception

cleanomic

Apr 23, 20142 min read

When we first saw the photographs from the wedding, my very first thought was ‘wow, our wedding looks pretty epic!’ It’s funny because, on that day, I didn’t really had the time to compute or pay any attention to what’s really going on mainly because I was too focused on my dresses, worrying that I might trip on the floor and greet all the guests (note, there were approximately 1,600 people attending our wedding). So, I was truly overwhelmed when I finally saw the entire spectrum of our wedding from the album and video.

Unlike the ceremony which was only attended by close family and friends, the reception is the event where we invite all of our extended relatives, friends and people in our community. Our wedding is a typical Indonesian wedding, meaning we don’t do small wedding but we like (or have to) do the big one. Indonesian is a very communal society, people might get offended if they weren’t invited to someone’s wedding. I know sometimes it doesn’t make any sense for western culture, but that is our culture here.

For me, I guess the main show of the reception was us wearing this exquisite and delicate costume. Our costume for the reception is a traditional Central Java costumes called ‘dodot’. The batik fabric that wrapped our body was handmade and extremely beautiful. I think it is almost 5-meter long and it requires a specific skill to be able to wrap the batik around our body. The hairdo, the makeup and the green paint on my forehead and are also very traditional – it’s called “Paes Solo Basahan”. It’s pretty hard to sit or walk on that costume, but we couldn’t miss the opportunity to wear them because we would never gonna wear that kind of dress without any super special occasion like our own wedding.