Not Serving Shark Fin Soup At Wedding Banquet – Part I
Ever since I’ve read/seen how shark fins are obtained to be sold in Asia for shark fin soup, I’ve been more conscious about consuming them. Now that it’s our turn to host a banquet where shark fin soups are traditionally part of the menu, I’d like to help raise awareness about this issue by not serving it at our wedding.If you’ve never seen shark finning before, here’s a video:
For the first part of gaining support for this cause, I spoke to Al about my idea of not serving shark fin soup. I’m hoping he would support me and with the two of us on the same page, it would be easier to convince the parents.
J: What do you think of the idea of not serving shark fin soup at our wedding?
A: Why? I like shark fin soup. It taste good (actually shark fin itself doesn’t have any taste) and it’s already on the set banquet menu. Plus people who attend our banquet will expect the soup to be present.
J: Well by not serving shark fin soup, we will be taking a stand and educating our guests at about sharks, finning, and the impact it has on our environment.
A: It’s not like not serving the soup at our wedding will make any difference. Why should we be the one trying to change it?
J: If everyone thinks that way then nothing will be changed. I see a few advantaged for not serving shark fin soup: a) When we explain why there’s no shark fin soup, the guests will be exposed to the many reasons behind our action such as the declining number of sharks in the ocean due to finning, the cruelty of taking just the fins off the sharks and throwing them back in the water to die, as well as the importance of sharks in our environment. b) If we replace it with a clear broth (such as abalone chicken soup) it will be lighter than a thick soup like shark fin and I believe many guests would appreciate it just as much. Plus it’ll make our banquet different than the usual Chinese banquets!
A: Well then why don’t you figure out what we can use to substitute for shark fin soup and we’ll see.
It doesn’t sound like Al completely agrees with me on this but I’m determined to push this idea forward so I went ahead and talk to my parents about it. I was a bit scared to bring up the idea because I know that shark fin soup is seen as a status symbol and it’s also a part of the Chinese tradition. Serving the four luxury seafood (abalone 鮑, sea cucumber 參, shark fin 翅 and fish maw 肚) to your guests is considered to be a sign of wealth and respect. I wonder how my dad, who cares more about traditions, will react to my request.
In Part II, I’ll write about my experience of talking to my parents and their response to my idea of not serving shark fin soup at the wedding.
Links of interest:
Saying no to shark fin soup, and tradition – Vancouver Sun.
Shark Finning Facts – Sharkwater (I highly recommend watching the documentary)
Counting Down to 8 More Months
Time is moving faster than I thought. We’re not down to 8 months left and frankly I haven’t really done much. Maybe it’s because a lot of the big items were taken care of before, such as: the pre-wedding photos, booking the restaurant and chapel, finding makeup artists for myself and the wedding party. Now with less than 8 months left, I’m starting to feel the pressure and I want to make sure I don’t miss any details for our wedding.
So I’ve casually sat down with my parents and asked about the dowry situation, as well as the number of cake cards and pastries we’d have to provide for my family. I’ve also created a timeline of what I need to do and which month they should be completed by. The list looked pretty short so I’m think I must have missed something. So far we still need to pick the flowers, book a florist, order the wedding cake, find a place for tux rentals (this should be pretty easy), figure out what we want for the center piece and assemble the invitations (I’m thinking of doing this over Christmas). There are a lot of items that seems like it can’t be completed too early, such as distributing the cake cards and pastries, giving the dowry and the whole roasted piglet (this should be done about a month before the wedding date I believe), and the fitting for the rental wedding gown and evening gowns. There are also some traditional stuff that I’m supposed to do closer to the wedding date. Hopefully there won’t be too many or it’ll throw me off my timeline. How did you manage all the different aspects of your wedding? And did you do any traditional ceremonies?
Seems like there’s still a lot to be done! I’m excited and can’t wait for the day to come! Oh and I’ve decided to launch our wedding website: http://shortynme.com. I’ve had it ready for quite sometime but didn’t want to make it live too early. Let me know what your thoughts on the design. :]
(Vancouver) Wedding Shows – Worth Going?
I’ve always wondered if weddings shows are worth going. Nowadays it seems you can get almost everything from the internet. From researching for vendors to drumming up ideas for cakes, flowers, centerpieces and invitations, there’s nothing you can’t find via Google or wedding portals/forums. This had made me wonder if it would be worth my money to pay $20-$50 to attend the local wedding shows. Here are some of my justifications:
Photography: I had wanted to take pre-wedding photos and from the list of exhibitors at those tradeshows, almost none of them have this service (I might have missed some so I apologize if there were vendors there that had pre-wedding photography services). As for wedding day photography, I would most likely go with the same studio that took my pre-wedding pictures. I already like their work, so it’s only natural that I hire them for the wedding day as well.
Wedding Gown: Fashion show for wedding gowns just doesn’t appeal to me. Seeing someone else wear the dress in front of me is nice but I’d still need to try it on to see if I like it (and whether or not the design will look good on me). So this is definitely not a reason why I’d want to attend a wedding show. Further more, I’ve decided to rent my gown because I didn’t want to keep it. So I could care less about the fashion show. And since I know I can rent a gown from the photo studio (most likely from the one I had chosen to take pre-wedding photography with), I don’t need to look for a specific vendor/designer.
Videography: Not applicable for us since we don’t plan on filming our wedding.
Stationary: I think this would be one of the reason why I’d go. There are so many ideas for creating wedding invitations like the paper choices and embellishments. It’d be great to pick up some ideas there. Allan and I actually went to quite a few craft/paper stores to look at invitation samples because images from website doesn’t always show exactly how they were made. Looking at it in person allowed me to examine the cards more closely.
Flowers: There are so many flower shops in town, I’m sure going to the wedding show will only allow me to meet the vendors that had the financially ability to exhibit at the show. With such a small budget for our wedding flowers, I’d much rather get recommendations from friends or look for independent florists, and hopefully this would work better for my budget as well.
Cake: This is a tough one. If they have cake tasting then I’d love to go. I still haven’t picked a bakery and the thought of spending time going from one bakery to the next to try their cake and do a consultation just seems like such a hassle. So if they have a cake section in the wedding show where I get to meet bakers and sample their cakes, that’d be great!
Favors: Again there are so many different favours and majority of them are available online. I bought my favor boxes from a local store (I think it was Wedding Things) and I still have to pay for shipping because what they do is actually order the product online for me (I could’ve done that myself!) However the nice thing about going to the store (or the show) is that you actually get to see and touch the actual product.
Decorations/Wedding Planners: Wedding planners are not applicable to our wedding because we’re both into event planning. As for venue decorations, I actually do have some interest in this. I know a few places offer rentals on items such as vases, pedestals, plants and lighting. For a Chinese banquet I was told that there isn’t much I can do in terms of setting up center pieces and such but I am determined to find a way to decorate the tables! Buying all the decorations would probably not be good for our budget so I’m looking in to part rentals and part DIY on the center pieces and maybe a few items to decorate the head table.
Based on the above, I’m really leaning towards not attending any wedding shows as it doesn’t seem like it’d be a great help for our wedding planning (plus with 2 people going it’d be $40 minimum per event). Our wedding is very traditional (Chinese) and that is probably why I felt this way about wedding show as well. It seems to be tailored for Western styled weddings. Has anyone been to the wedding shows? What are your thoughts and how did it help you with your wedding planning?
E-Card To My Wedding Helpers
For some reason I’ve been incorporating email marketing tools for my wedding planning. I’m still working on the E-Card for Save-the-Date but I’ve also created a reminder/notice for my wedding helpers as well. I’ve asked my friends to help out for our wedding almost a year ago and I thought it’s time to remind them again (although a few of them had already asked me what they can help me with, now that the wedding is under 9 months away).
So here’s the email that I’ve created to be sent to all my wedding helpers:
[Click on the image to enlarge.]
The emails will be personalized. The text inside the << >> are for merging. So “Test First Name” would be the name of my friend and “Test Title” is their position, ie: Maid of Honor, Best Man, Wedding Helper and MC.
If you’re wondering why I’m using a Pokemon theme for the reminder, well I can’t tell you because I don’t know why either. I wanted to make the email fun and with a bit of humor, because that’s what we wanted our wedding to be, fun for everyone.
Save-the-Date E-Cards
With less than 9 months to go, I’ve finally started preparing for our wedding (again). The wedding website have been designed during summer and will be launched shortly. I still have to get my brother to show me how to add the RSVP section. Since I’m trying to make sure there will be no surprise guests showing up, I’ll have all the guests pre-filled in my database and the number for people these guests can bring with them. It’s a little complicated to explain right now so once I get it working I’ll post again.
Originally I don’t plan on sending any Save-the-Date cards because majority of the guests are local and I have already given the date of our wedding to all my out of town relatives. However, I feel it would be a good idea to “officially” remind my guests about the wedding date, especially those from out of town, so they can start booking their vacation days and plan for next year.
To cut down cost, plus to be green, I’ve opted to use E-cards for Save-the-Date notifications. My plan right now is to use MailChimp, an email service provider, to send out a nice looking HTML formatted email. It would be nice if the guests can tell me whether or not they are thinking of attending (this way I can get a better estimate on the total number of expected guests), so I’m in the process of coming up with a “early-bird” RSVP form. It’s early-bird because the official invitation won’t be going out until next Spring.
The only difficult part about sending out Save-the-Date E-Cards is the fact that some of my relatives don’t use emails, or I don’t have their email address. So a bit of extra work for me would be to call them up, notify them by phone, and then email them the E-Card. And for those that don’t use or don’t have emails, do you think I should make a Save-the-Date card for them or do you think telling them over the phone would suffice?
