Korean Wedding 2

In December 2009 we attended a Korean wedding in Seoul and it was a very unique glimpse into the normal lives of Koreans, so when my coworker was getting married this Spring I did my best to score an invite.

My coworker Johnny is ethnically Korean but born and raised in the States.  He moved here a few years ago and started dating Korean women, and I learned a lot about Korean women from his stories and solicitations of relationship advice.  Weddings can be stressful when two Americans tie the knot, so to have two cultures intermingled made this one a little more complicated.

Andrew and I attended their wedding on Easter Sunday afternoon in a wedding hall in a neighboring town.  Wedding halls in Korea are full-package deals for the ceremony and reception and they have multiple weddings going on at the same time in different rooms.  The wedding we attended was at 2pm but the next one was scheduled for 4pm so it was a quick event.

I won't bore you with the details since I've already written about a Korean wedding, but here are some parts of the experience I thought were worth sharing:

• When we arrived at the wedding hall, we showed our invitation and were given two meal tickets.  We could choose to eat at the buffet before, during, or after the ceremony we were invited to attend.  That meant we were eating with the guests of many different weddings.
• For the ceremony, the guests were seated in round tables in the ceremony room.  Most shocking to me was how the guests were using the ceremony as a social hour: coming in and out, greeting one another and talking, or playing on smartphones.  It seemed that no one was paying attention!
• All the wedding photos were taken in a studio a few months ago and on display in the reception hall.  Both Johnny and his wife were wearing different tuxes/gowns in the pictures than they had on that day and Johnny was wearing different glasses.  He had told me that the wedding photographers were very restrictive in the pictures and they waxed his eyebrows beforehand and even told him which faces to make for the silly pictures.  The pictures turned out stunning, but I'm afraid they didn't capture his personality very well.  Maybe if Andrew loses a bet I'll make him take Korean wedding photos with me just for the bizarre experience of it.

Cheers to Johnny and Jennifer! 

(Side note: Johnny chose the English name Jennifer for his wife and he calls her that.  He says it was because her hair reminded him of Jennifer Anniston, and he also named her Korean friends after famous celebrities in the States. I feel sorry for the woman he named Charlize....)