u/Vegetable_Shake7020

Hello everyone,

I’m Vietnamese and my fiancée is Nepalese, and we’re getting married this summer in the UK.

Nepalese weddings involve several ceremonies, so rather than having multiple events before the wedding, we decided to include one ceremony from each culture at our wedding venue. For my side, we’re planning a Vietnamese tea ceremony on the morning of the wedding.

My parents and my father’s siblings did not have tea ceremonies when they got married in the UK, so this will be the first time our wider family has experienced one here.

Traditionally, the groom’s family waits outside the bride’s home with gift trays and is formally welcomed in by the bride’s family. Because both immediate families and the wedding party will already be at the venue early for preparations, and other guests will start arriving before the ceremony, we’re finding this part difficult to recreate exactly.

Our plan is:

1. My immediate family will be at the entrance to greet guests and direct them into the tea ceremony room.
2. A family member will act as MC (my younger cousin but his father is the oldest sibling) and briefly introduce the ceremony.
3. I will enter with my groomsmen carrying the gift trays, which the bridesmaids will receive and display.
4. One of the bridesmaids will collect my fiancée so she can make her entrance.
5. We will serve tea to our grandparents and parents, who will offer blessings and advice.
6. Our toastmaster will then direct guests to the cocktail hour.

Does this still capture the core elements of a traditional Vietnamese tea ceremony, or are we adapting it too much? In particular, how important is it to recreate the groom’s family waiting outside and being formally welcomed in?

I’d really appreciate any thoughts or advice.

Thank you!

Edit: From most your comments I’ve realised I wrote way too much, so here is a shorter version of what I was trying to say.

I know a lot of the “V2 in my gym” comments are just jokes and part of climbing internet culture. I’m not talking about those. I’m talking more about the people who seem genuinely annoyed when someone posts a hard climb that looks easier than expected and are sincerely convinced that it is several grades easier based only on a short video.

My main take is that a lot of these massive downgrades come from people trying to judge climbs above their own experience level. Video hides a lot of what actually makes a climb hard such as wall angle, hold quality, body positioning, tension and how bad the feet are. A climb can look like a jug ladder on video and still be genuinely hard.

What made me think about this more was seeing people aggressively downgrade Colin Duffy’s indoor climbs, only for other commenters to point out that he is literally an Olympic climber and probably has a better idea of what V10–V13 feels like than most of us. I found that pretty funny.

I’ve also noticed that a lot of send videos quickly turn into grade wars where the focus shifts from “nice send” to explaining why the grade doesn’t count. In some cases it feels less like a genuine grading discussion and more like a way of putting the climber down a peg.

This is obviously a pretty trivial internet phenomenon and mostly a non-issue. I just find it interesting from both a climbing and psychology point of view.

This post is specifically about indoor climbing. I know outdoor grades are established through consensus over time, and I’m not talking about elite climbers debating whether something is V13 or V14.

For context, my hardest send is one V8 and a few V7s, but I’d consider myself more of a V6 climber overall. None of my own videos have received this kind of attention (probably because they’ve never reached the algorithm), so this isn’t about defending my own grades. It’s just something I’ve noticed repeatedly when watching climbing content online.

In short, climbs are much harder to judge from video than people think, and some people seem far too confident in downgrading climbs they’ve never actually tried.