A couple of weekends ago, we went to our co-teacher, Erica’s, wedding. We didn’t really know what to expect and boy, were we mildly suprised. Korean weddings are awesomely weird, and weirdly awesome. We went to a big building near Jungang station which was effectively the wedding chapel. However in reality it was more like another one of the medium sized buildings in that area and by looking at it, you couldn’t really tell that weddings went on there. Inside it was all very shiny with lots of flowers.
The way Korean weddings work are very fast. The bride and groom basically get an hour long ceremony and then everyone goes for a huge buffet afterward. Strangely, considering how obsessed some Koreans are with image, people don’t really dress up for weddings and there were some t-shirts and jeans to be seen. We went up to the area where the actual ceremony was taking place and waited around in the lobby for the other wedding to finish. When it did, we went to sit down and waited for our ceremony to begin while the other bunch of people left. Very bizzare.
The ceremony starts with the mother in laws going up to the front. They wear hanbok, which is tradition Korean ceremonial dress:
The groom, whose name is Hyun, then comes up, followed by the bride. There are some ladies who wear a hideous, shiny purple skirt-suit to help the bridge and groom all the time. They also hold up some swords for the bride and groom to go under – awesome!
Here’s some mid ceremony pictures of the bride and groom:
The ceremony then continues, all in Korean obviously, and then a guy sings. Yes it really is that random. The first song was “She” and the guy screwed up one of the lines, which was funny. He then sang a second song, which was an insane Korean rap song. I have never seen anything this funny. I got a video, here it is:
The bride and groom then cut the cake and left at a big cannon full of streamers went off – fun!
Then, large group photos were taken of both families:
After the photos, we then went upstairs for the buffet. There was absolutely loads of food and drink. Obviously we stuffed and drunk ourselves silly because it was free!
Here’s Rich and Alex having a good time. The view of Ansan from the dining room (which was on the top floor) was pretty good. Here’s a quick picture:
At the end, Erica and Hyun came over to say thanks and we got two nice pictures together:
We hung around at the buffet for a long while after the wedding was over. In fact we stayed so long that there was an incredibly awkward moment when the next bride and groom came over to say thank you and then realised that they didn’t know a bunch of westerners and walked off. Eek.
So all in all the wedding was good, if not a little impersonal and insane. That’s pretty much Korea all over though…
