Three lighter Gulf stories

From Gulf News:

A Saudi groom was slapped by his mother on his wedding night when he tried , in a romantic Cinderella-inspired touch, to put a shoe on his bride’s foot.

“The shocked mother was so infuriated by the sight of her son helping the bride wear her shoe that she slapped him amid the laughter of the women guests,” Okaz daily reported on Thursday.
“The groom had reportedly agreed with his bride that she walks into the reception hall wearing only one shoe and that her sister would carry the second shoe. The plan was that he would later take the shoe and put it on the bride’s foot in front of the guests. His family was not told about the perceived romantic gesture,” the newspaper said.

However, the groom’s mother became so upset that she hit and insulted him on the grounds that he did not behave as “a genuine traditional oriental man.”

The groom eventually left the reception hall in Tabuk in north-western Saudi Arabia and took his bride to the airport to fly to Malaysia for their honeymoon, the paper said.

In a separate incident in the same city, angry wedding guests left the reception hall after the families of the bride and groom screened a short film “that failed to respect privacy.”

According to Okaz, the short clip highlighted the different stages of the lives of both the bride and the groom, from their early years throughout school and adolescence, and ended with the couple hugging and exchanging a kiss.

However, some guests were shocked, charging that the clip was not acceptable and that it was inspired by movies screened on private television channels.

An attempt by a group of Gulf national women to enforce a dress code led a British tourist to strip down to her bikini at Dubai Mall.

A group of Gulf national women recently tried to enforce a dress code morally acceptable to them by distributing leaflets to women they found to be dressed inappropriately, a Dubai Mall official said.

A British tourist who was approached objected to the gesture and stripped down to a bikini she was wearing underneath in defiance.