BARELY 24 hours after she got married in a beautiful garden ceremony, local actress Eelyn Kok was on a plane.

Not to her honeymoon location though.

She was alone on her way to Kuala Lumpur, where she's filming the new Singapore-Malaysia TV co-production, whose title is loosely translated as Village Of Fish And Rice. She plays a village tomboy.

Kok, 32, spoke to The New Paper over the phone from KL the day after her wedding and said she was already missing her husband.

The couple had only one hour of private time together after solemnising their marriage. They exchanged vows on Oct 10 at 10.10am in an intimate ceremony held at Fort Canning Park and witnessed by 150 guests.

Kok invited close showbiz friends Jesseca Liu and Darren Lim, but both couldn't attend as they had to work.

She doesn't intend to hold a wedding banquet.

"I was reluctant to leave him this morning. But it was en route to my hotel from the Kuala Lumpur airport that I really began to miss him," said Kok.

"I knew he would be asleep, so I sent him an SMS."

Then, while she was still on the way to her hotel, she was told that filming for the day had been cancelled.

A female co-star had fallen ill.

"I was very upset, but at least now I have some time to rest," Kok said.

Her husband, who wants to be known only as Mr Goh, is a 32-year-old IT professional.

The two met more than three years ago through her primary school classmate.

It wasn't love at first sight for the actress, but she admitted that she thought he looked very attractive then in his white shirt.

The MediaCorp artiste has been filming in KL since early August and was so bogged down with work that she bought her wedding gown only two weeks before the big day.

She returned to Singapore two days before the wedding and had time for only a DIY facial treatment at home.

While it upset her that she couldn't spend time with her loved ones before the wedding, seeing their joyful faces as she walked down the aisle made the ceremony extra special for her.

Emotional

She admitted she shed a few tears.

"I was initially very happy to see my family and friends there. When I saw my brothers, I cried because my mother couldn't be there with us," she said.

Her mother died of cancer seven years ago. Her father, too, wept at the wedding.

She said she had to compose herself and wipe her tears away before she faced the guests.

She admitted that getting married in real life was a completely different experience from acting as a bride in TV dramas.

"When I walked down the aisle in my shows, I didn't know the people sitting there. I also didn't feel like crying," she explained.

Kok confessed to being a romantic at heart.

She said she bought her wedding gown instead of renting it because it's something very important to her.

She said: "It's the dress I got married in. Even though I probably won't wear it again, I didn't want to have a memory of it through just photos."

She also kept a few stalks of the white and champagne roses from the ceremony and took it to KL with her.

She will return to Singapore when filming ends in December.

And her honeymoon will have to wait until April because she wants to go to Japan during the cherry blossom season.

Meanwhile, the newly-weds have to be content with just talking on the telephone.

Said Kok: "I didn't use to call him every day because I was usually too tired. "But I think I will now because there's a special bond between us now."

This article was first published in The New Paper.