Hi everyone...
Today I'm (or maybe better to say I and all my team mates) so excited because our 5 years project is done :-D.
I and some indonesian friends who are running a binational relationship and managing a binational marriage community have since 5 years ago started a project to publish a book about multicultural love & partnership.
This book would contain the general obstacles in such relationship and what we have done to overcome them. This is basically written based on real experiences of our community member (the one who are still in early stage of marriage until those who have survived more than 20 years of a marriage and even already separated by death).
In this book we would also find some tipps regarding bureucracy and legal problems from visa thingy until the everything we need to handle when our spouse passed away or when a marriage needs to be dissolved.
This project had taken so long because it's however a voluntary project (the income we get, would be used to finance our organisation and all our future projects ín some social activities) and we are all living in many different countries/continents, so the management and organisation matters are not that easy to do either.
We can only communicate through internet and our personal life has naturally a priority.
Moreover, we finally decided to make it an indie project, so... that is the next reason why it takes so long to finish it. But now it's finally done so we all feel content today :).
Now we're in pre-Launching order phase and we hope that by end of next month, the book are already able to be found on the bookstore :). Well, it's written in indonesian language and our main target are naturally Indonesians, but I still wanna share my excitement here anyhow ^_^.
Who knows that some of you are dating an indonesian at the moment, so you and your future partner might get some use of this book :-D .
This is how the book looks like (Title: Mixed Marriage - Sebuah Tantangan / Mixed Marriage - The Challenge).
The cover designer and illustrator is living in France (with another 2 writers), 1 is living in China, 2 of us reside in Germany, the rest are in USA and Indonesia.
Finishing this book just remind me of my own love story and wedding ceremony more than 7 years ago.
This is me in my wedding attire. It's rather simple as we had it done in Germany, but later I will embed few videos, where you can watch how it normally looks like when a wedding is held in my country.
Last time I have written that Indonesia is an archipelago with multiple cultures, contains more than 17.000 islands and naturally has a big number of tribes. Here in this video you can take a look various kind of traditional wedding attires from our numerous tribes (the authentic traditional ones):
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Indonesia is indeed the biggest moslem country in the world (because our population reaches 250 million people now and the majority are registered as moslem). But here you can see that Indonesia is not typical moslem nation like those in middle east.
The following video is featuring the indonesian national costume (Kebaya and Kain) which is derived from Javanese traditional attire (as the dominant folks in amount and development), but with the touch of modern design. They are all stunningly sexy, aren't they ( I meant the costumes :-D ) ?
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frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>The next videos show the wedding ceremony of a binational marriage held in Indonesia. The first video is cut version of the ceremony and the 2nd one is showing the rituals much more detail (it's quite long though).
Both are presenting a javanese wedding ceremony.
I didn't hold such ceremony because we had our wedding in Germany.
In Indonesia you need to have the same religion to get married, so it was not an option for us. None of us want to convert. My husband is an agnostic and I won't force him to adopt my belief, if there is still another way out to get married.
The next reason was because such wedding would have cost us a lot more than we could actually afford to waste (we're rather simple and pragmatic type and prefer to use the money for building our future instead of enjoying being the king and the queen only for a day LOL. But somehow, I still find it really beautiful and sacred).
If we were born really rich, I would not mind to have one as well :-D ^_^ .
Every ritual represents a particular javanese philosophy just like my baby shower I shared last time. If anybody interested to know about it more details, please say it in the comment and I will write about it next time.
Enjoy it please ;) !
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Note: The videos don't belong to me. You can see the identity of the real owner in the video it self :).
Don't forget to follow me:
@kobold-djawa
Thanks for the great article. The pictures and videos were amazing.
Ps: Dont forget to comment on my post you voted up (and maybe a follow) to spread the love
Hi.... nice to meet you and thanks for the vote.
Yes, whenever I watch those videos it makes me wanna marry again hahaha (not with a different man though :-D)