If there’s one thing that stands out as you “mature”, its the succession of days that it takes to recover from a big night out on the turps.  It’s only now, for example, on the dawn of the aftermath of a wedding reception on Saturday night, that the synapses have started firing on more than one cylinder.

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever”, so says Keats.  And while Keats is the man, clearly he hasn’t been to a Vietnamese wedding.

A Vietnamese wedding, let it be known, is a pretty surreal occasion to attend.  Especially when you don’t speak a lick of unAustralian.  And it’s not just that everyone else is four feet shorter than you, which makes you feel like you’re dining at the table alone, no.  And it’s not the bartering for your bride that sets it apart – No, I, too, think a basket of fruit seems a fair trade for a slice of the opposite sex.

No.  The real McCoy is that somewhere between that eighth beer and the tequila shots that began shortly after the little hand reached nine, you start to realise you can actually understand Vietnamese – and you’ve disseminated this from the broken pieces of pigeon-English that are tossed in as filler between real Vietnamese words.  And these scattered remnants of language form together in your mind to tell vast and bewildering tales of the events unfolding before you.

And somewhere in that tale, between the hordes of ninjas pillaging the village of scantily clad women; where rice wine seeped like golden honey from the comb-layered mountainside in thick streams; two people finally tied the knot.

The real kicker about a Vietnamese wedding however, is that the karaoke at the end of the night is in English. So it’s like the whole event was some foreign and elaborate masquerade. A marathon of a practical joke, which ends with the thumping punchline of: “My Sharona!”.

For anyone who’s familiar with Zatôichi – this was totally exactly like that.