It was a beautiful and bright morning and the sun was just coming out as I habitually checked my Samsung cell phone for calls and messages.
"Daddy..wake up liao bo? I am inside the KLIA express train lu at 6.45am...", the text message from my daughter seemed to scream at me with excitement in her usual bubbly style of talk.
Amy and Nicholas were on the KLIA Express train heading towards KLIA International Airport. They were en route to their first honeymoon in Australia.
How nice and romantic for this generation of newly weds! Married on Sun in Malacca and today, 2 days later already flying off for a vacation overseas.
After 34 years of happy marriage I still owe my wife a honeymoon vacation. Occasionally I would get a nudge on the ribs and a gentle reminder from her about that episode of our marriage that I didn't fulfill. It is not that we have not holidayed overseas before. But I suppose those past happy vacations in Thailand with relatives and friends weren't romantic enough to count as honeymoon.
Back then our dire straits did not permit us to afford lavish wedding dinners and a post wedding holiday in the country, not to mention an overseas honeymoon. Our wedding was as bare bone and basic as two people could afford: no entourage of relatives and friends to accompany us to register our marriage except for our rent lord and rent lady who were roped in at the last minute as witness, no in-studio and on-location photograph shooting sessions that are part and parcel of modern day wedding photography packages, a simple 12 table wedding dinner, no post-wedding holiday, and no home to start our married life other than our rented room in a terraced house. At that time my wife was a factory production operator and I working as a junior draftsman for a contractor. As both sides of our family were not wealthy we had to rely on our own resources rather than financial assistance from our families to fund our marriage.
I remember the morning after our wedding my wife dutifully woke up early in the morning to help her new mother-in-law mom prepare breakfast, sweep the floor, wash laundry, cooked lunch and dinner and do other household chores. After one day of rest on Sun both of us returned from my home town Ipoh to our rented room in KL on Monday by bus to resume our day jobs.
Although our marriage story is hardly the stuff of high romance and the ideal template to offer to today's newly weds it worked at that time and is still working today; perhaps it is the shared hardships through the years that is the cement that binds two soul mates together even to this day.
After our son's marriage at the end of the year, I guess it will be a good time to think about where to take the wife to for our first honeymoon vacation. Who is to say that oldies don't have romantic notions and can't have their honeymoon?
Wishing Nicholas and Amy enjoy a happy honeymoon vacation.
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