Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Getting Married in Japan Part 3 – Green napkins cost extra

I should first apologize for the slow speed in which I am following up on this immensely popular series of posts. For those of you who need a quick recap, I recommend going through the earlier chapters in this series you can find here.

After locating a pleasant and reasonable hotel with the facilities we required for our not too elaborate plan of a wedding ceremony followed by a wedding reception/dinner we sat down with the wedding planner to discuss more in detail what could be done and within what budget. Our planner turned out to be a young guy with nicotine stained teeth with a quick sly answer for any of our questions and concerns, if you think Jennifer Lopez in the movie “the wedding planner” and then don’t, you are getting somewhat close to our guy.

After some light probing from his side on how much money we were looking to spend (to which we wisely stated a considerably lower sum than we were actually thinking of spending) he quickly whipped out a quote that looked quite reasonable and within our budget. However, after the initial decision of location and the meetings the following weeks with our planner, the florist and other people from the hotel we quickly learned that things were a bit deceiving…

Before we made the final decision we also attended a dinner where we could try out the dinner course for next to nothing, and see examples of color coordination and flower arrangements together with other hopeful couples. About half way into the dinner it turned into a hardcore sales event where they tried to push a host of “spectacular events” on us that we could pay up a hefty amount of money to have at our reception, most of them involving smoke, bubbles or fluorescent liquids and the most elaborate ones a combination of all of them. Needless to say, the efforts were wasted on us…

Following that, a very common occurrence was discussions like the one below:

Florist: So, what type of flowers are you thinking of?
Mrs. Sunshine-Salaryman: Well, we liked the orange ones we saw at one of the tables
Florist: Oh… In your package there are only rotten gray flowers included, but we can upgrade you, no problem
Mrs. Sunshine-Salaryman: And we liked that vase
Florist: Oh… no vase is included in your package, but sure, we can upgrade you, what color of table cloth did you like?
Mrs. Sunshine-Salaryman: We liked the green cloth with the orange napkins
Florist: Oh… green cloth, that’s extra and the orange napkins will also cost a little extra, but sure, we are more than happy to upgrade you

This type of conversation was repeated a large number of times…

Coming up next: Financing the wedding…

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

elope to vegas if at all possiable. and save yourself the problems

Implosion said...

Ditto- I'm with anonymous. Vegas is great this time of the year.

ThePenguin said...

Too late now, but why didn't you just go for the Lockup in Ikebukuro? Simple tabehodai / nomihodai plan, entertainment included, I'm sure one of the guests would have been able to escort you home afterwards, it's not far (unless you moved since then).

Me said...

I like the City Hall (Ward office) route. Quick, painless and beyond cheap!

Chris said...

"elope to vegas if at all possiable. and save yourself the problems"

After Hawaii, Vegas is my 2nd favorite place to visit :) I LOVE it!!

But I just caught "Leaving Las Vegas" for the first time last night "Thanks uTorrent" :)

So... Drug/alcohol dependency, co-dependency, mutualy destructive relationships, gang rape, infidelity, etc are all i can think off for now :(

Stick to the script your on :)


The next time I land in L.V. all will be forgotten. I wonder if the international flights had that movie on their movie list? I went their around then and didn't see it??

Mr. Salaryman said...

Anonymous and Implosion - Well, that really wasn't an option since there still would be a need for a local party... But hey, I would love to go to Vegas!

Penguin - Yeah, why do all the good ideas come afterwards? Great idea but too late, but you would've been the best man getting me home!

Me - Well, you can't really avoid that in any case due to the ceremony/marriage difference here in Japan, it will come later too

Chris - I don't care, I just want to go back to Hawaii!

Martin said...

Chris

I thought the Leaving Las Vegas trailers (Check link) were sort of missleading. It portrays the film as an easy going comedy. Nothing bout any death and rape there.

Even though, I didn´t like that film very much. Mostly for Nicolas poor acting.

pejo81 said...

How expensive it is to get married in japan? How many guest that you got t o invite and is there any special ceremony that you need to organize i.e any traditional stuff.

Mr. Salaryman said...

Hey Pejo81, I don'T want to jump too far ahead and give stuff away here in the comments section since it will be the topic of further posts, but send me a mail and I promise to reply!

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