Today’s the auspicious day of my friend and I helped out as a jie mei. Again. Haha.. I heard that people who helped out too much as jie mei or xiong di will end up being left on the shelf. *gasp* But this really doesn’t bother me. Yet.

We arrived at her place at about 10am, nearly losing our ways through the pyramid of carparks. We met her mum at the lift, but we didn’t quite recognise her. Sorry aunty! She wasn’t 1/2 way through her makeup when we arrived and we started planning the tekan session. Muahahahaha!

There’s the usual suan1 tian2 ku3 la4 for the brotherhood (xiong di). The suan1 was peeled lime and lemon, tian2 wasa banana with wasabi, ku3 was standard cut bittergourd and la4 was chilli with extra wasabi. I heard that someone teared after eating it. *shiver*

As usual, there wasn’t enough time to execute all the “punishments”, and because we need to watch out from missing the auspicious hour. At least this group was more sporting than the previous group from the previous wedding that I attended. However, the red packet was kinda pathetic. Oops!

After the groom picked up the bride, we went over to the groom’s place, where the tea ceremony is first held. Following which, we had a quick lunch, and it was time for the jie meis to catch the flowers. Guess who got hold of the flowers? Nope, I didn’t. In fact, most of us wanted to siam the flowers and were watching closely at the projectile of the flowers. Congrats to the girl who got it!

Following which, it was back to the niang2 jia1, where the 2nd session of the tea ceremony is held with the bride’s parents. There was supposed to be photo taking at the Botanical Gardens after that, but with the hot, scorching sun baring itself at us, all the jie mei xiong di decided to give it a miss.

The dinner will be this Saturday… but there’s ping.sg anniversary celebrations! Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to drop by ping.sg and move on quickly to the dinner.

A few things on 1st July 2007 will go down in history… probably not as something good:

1. GST hike from 5% to 7% - woohoo! done in the name of helping the poor, although there has been widespread speculation that it was meant for the minister’s pay hike.
2. NETS hike for merchants from between 0.35 and 0.55 per cent of the purchases to 1.5 to 1.8 per cent - this increase in cost will probably be passed back to the consumers. NETS has advised all merchants not to pass the cost down to the consumers. I think they must be dreaming - the merchants need to eat, drink and sleep too; and they don’t survive on air.
3. No smoking in pubs and beer wells - well, this is a good thing for me cos’ I don’t smoke, and neither do most of my friends. But I am sure a lot of people will be looking for the yellow box soon.
4. Cigarette price hike = apparently, cost of cigarettes went up too, although I am not sure by how much. Sometimes, I wonder why they don’t just ban the whole thing instead of leading smokers to spend more each day.
5. Petrol price hike - the cost of petrol is as volatile as the stock market in Singapore, and this is hidden in a myriad of conditional discounts that get drivers totally confused. This habit of hidding costs in complex Newtonian formulas can also be seen in taxi surcharges.
6. Starhub CableTV fee hike - actually it’s on 11 July 2007, but it’s just to add on to the list - subscribers pay between $4 to $10 more in their fees depending on whether they subscribe to the sports channel - who commanded the $10 increase.

In addition, I heard that the transport fare hike is coming soon - August or October or somewhere around there. I heard that it’s just a mere few cents - won’t hurt you much.