My humiliation in Zhengzhou (includes photo)

I would consider myself to be a relatively normal bloke. Like most blokes, I’m not hugely keen on being photographed (despite being tremendously good-looking, as Donald Trump would say). This means that wedding photos are a challenge.

I don’t know if you’ve been lucky enough to get married in China. If you have, you’ll know that they take wedding photos to a different level there. It’s not just a matter of hiring a photographer to herd people around for cheesy photos between the ‘official proceedings’ and the food. In China, they take a whole day over it, usually before the wedding itself. You go to the photographer’s studio, and they give you dozens of different outfits to wear, and they snap you in front of various sets they have in different parts of the studio, painted to look like Italian pergolas or traditional Chinese houses or whatever.

Needless to say, I wasn’t exactly in my element (although Xiaofang was). You can see one of the pictures here.

So what’s the moral of this story? Despite the fact that it was all a bit of a surprise to me – it was actually an extremely well-run and effective way of doing things. It all gets done very efficiently, and you end up with a briefcase full of mounted prints (in different styles), plus a CD with hundreds of professionally composed (and if necessary, retouched) photos. Enough to satisfy any number of in-laws. They know what they need to achieve, and that’s exactly what they deliver. A bit like the way we sort out intercompany agreements and corporate structures for our clients …

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