Chapter 8. Part 2. Deploying My Unsubtle Spy.

My Big Fat Guangdong Wedding

Chapter 8.  Clothes, Photos, Swords, and the World’s Most Unsubtle Spy.

Part 2.  Deploying My Unsubtle Spy.

 

Friday morning we showed up for the wedding photo shoot and changed into our matching red outfits.  The hair and makeup session for my darling was supposed to take 90 minutes.  It took almost 2 hours.  In the meantime, I read a book and exchanged text messages with Cantonese Twin 2.  She was in position and getting bored.  I went to check on my darling to see what was taking so long and was shocked to find what appeared to be someone else sitting there wearing her dress.  The makeup was so heavy that I wasn’t really sure it was her until she spoke. 

They decided to try some makeup on me and managed to get it in my eyes.   At least the makeup girl gave up quickly and didn’t cover me too badly.

Finally, I, my darling fiancee, and our lovely daughter piled into a van with a driver, photographer, photographer’s assistant, and a prop girl.  I let Cantonese Twin 2 know we were on the way.  The driver promptly got into the wrong lane and drove past KeYuan Garden on an elevated section of the road so I had to let my spy know I’d be a little late.

We made it in.  In my experience, Chinese seem to think that glasses are something that shouldn’t ever be part of photos, so I wasn’t wearing mine.  This should have made spotting Cantonese Twin 2 difficult, since she should have been no closer than 10-15 meters most of the time.  I did catch a quick glimpse of her on a second floor balcony as we passed beneath.  So far, so good.

 

 

The plan was to have photos taken at various points around the park.  After a couple of photos with me and my darling, some pics were being taken just of her.  A couple of girls came by and were taking my picture. (Later information revealed that they’d never seen a foreigner dress up in a Chinese outfit for any reason and were very impressed that I’d do it for my wedding).  Since I’m always willing to totally prostitute myself for attention such a friendly person, I even posed for a couple pictures with them.  I then got pulled back into the official photo shoot and saw my spy at a less than subtle distance behind the photographer.  Had it been a quick couple of photos while walking past, that would have been fine, but she was standing there for several minutes at least.  There was no way to signal her to back off without pointing her out to the photo crew.

 

 

Other than that, the main issue was that no matter what direction I faced, the wind shifted to be from behind me so that my hair would do all sorts of unpredictable things.  Still, the pics came out pretty good.

 

 

We moved on to another spot.  My spy got close again.  Way too close.

 

 

Now Cantonese Twin 2 seemed to have made friends with the other 2 girls.  At first, she seemed to have finally gotten the concept of subtlety down. . .

 

 

But not for long.  Soon enough, they were happily taking pics of each other with our wedding photo shoot in the background. 

 

 

Just when I thought things had hit rock bottom in the “How blatantly obvious can this get?” department, my spy started chatting with the photographer.

  

Amazingly, it worked.  The photographer seemed flattered by the attention and even gave his phone number to her.

 

 

The other 2 girls also continued to hang out, and we all moved around the park together.  This resulted in the main photo shoot, pics of the main shoot, sometimes including others, sometimes not, and side pics of the extra people posing with whoever wasn’t in the main photo shoot at the moment.

 

 

Next, we moved into a garden area.  Not surprisingly, KeYuan Garden is well equipped with gardens.

 

 

And then we moved on to another section of the walkway around the pond in KeYuan.

 

 

One thing I like about that section of the walkway is that it has a round doorway.

 

 

Sometimes, round doorways have gravity issues. 

 

 

I now have an extra 200 pictures from my spy to sort through while waiting to see what the wedding studio has (happily available now that I’m redoing the blog with photos 4 years later).  There are even a few pics from another couple’s wedding photo shoot that were taken by my spy before we arrived at the park,  Those appear to have been done from a reasonable distance, unlike most of the pics she took for me. 

 

 

After leaving KeYuan Garden (and leaving Cantonese Twin 2 and the 2 extra girls behind), we went back to the wedding studio to have lunch and get ready for the next round of photos at a different park.

If you want to know more about KeYuan Garden, here’s the KeYuan Museum website (in Chinese), a short article on KeYuan in Wikipedia, and another article about the park in TravelChinaGuide.

 <– Back to Chapter 8, Part 1.          –> Chapter 8. Part 3.  Stale Potato Chips and More Outdoor Pics. –>