A few weeks ago a coworker of mine got married, and I was lucky enough to be invited to the wedding. Despite three of my closest friends getting married in the past two years, I haven't been to an American wedding since I was little. (Sorry, guys! I just love to travel!) What I know about American weddings is that they're generally long, expensive for everyone involved, and it's about making the parents happy, not the bride and groom.
Korean weddings, on the other hand, can be summed up in three words: shiny and efficient.
Not that I'm complaining! The entire ceremony was about 15 minutes long, followed by another 15 minutes of photo-taking. I missed my train due to a stupid subway error--I've been here for 11 months and I'm still confusing Yongsan with Yongmun, rookie mistake--and ended up running the entire way from the subway station to the wedding hall. Good thing I did, or I might have missed the whole ceremony!
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| Blurry, but sparkly and the lighting is good. Also shows how reflective the catwalk/aisle is. |
I'm not sure how these weddings normally go, but my coworker asked our boss (the not-Asian guy on the stage) to deliver the wedding speech. It was beautiful and heartfelt, and I understood the whole thing because spoke in English. His Korean wife translated for the rest of the wedding party.
While she translated, I was paying attention to the wedding hall. The wedding halls in Korea are specially-designed large soundproof rooms that run on a very tight schedule. The rooms are very sparkly and shiny. This particular room is on the 18th floor of a large building. The flowers are all fake, which I was happy about because real ones make me sneezy. The 'aisle' is actually a raised white catwalk. Most brides rent their dresses from the wedding venue.
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| Look how shiny everything is! |
I may have been young when I went to those American weddings, but I remember a few things. People were silent during the ceremony. They were very dressed up. People cried.
At this wedding, most of the guests were talking during the speech. It didn't seem particularly rude or unusual. People came and left during the ceremony as well, coming and going to the 'reception,' which is basically a large buffet. Most people weren't particularly dressed up. Nobody seemed especially emotional except the bride, who was crying adorably through most of the ceremony. (But don't worry, the wedding hall plans for this--they've got a special attendant whose job is to wipe the bride's face dry without mussing her makeup! Seriously, the wedding hall takes care of everything.)
I read in a book that it was bad luck for a Korean bride to smile during her wedding. But that book had a lot of other weird, outdated, and straight-up wrong information, so who knows?
After the speech, the bride and groom bow to both sets of parents, who are sitting on opposite sides of the stage in traditional Korean dress (for the moms) and suits (for the dads).
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| About to bow. |
The bride stays standing, but the groom gets on the floor and bows. This is also how Koreans bow to the dead, I believe. If you look on the left side of the photo, you'll also see the parents bowing back.
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| Bowing. |
Can't find the groom? Let me help you.
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| There he is! See his hair? |
The bride and groom say "I do" and kiss...
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| Smoochie smoochie. |
...and then things get a little weird for a few minutes. Karaoke is really popular in Korea, so when two random people got on stage and started singing a love duet, I figured they were friends of the groom. They seemed like normal people, a bit underdressed to be at a wedding, but excellent singers. I learned later that they were actually employees of the wedding hall, strangers to the bride and groom, whose job was to sing such a love duet to newlywed couples. They sang one song and left.
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| There are some cultural differences that I will never understand. |
With the strange love-duet over, the bride and groom walked together down the aisle/catwalk as trumpets showered them with confetti.
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| A very handsome couple. |
Sadly, I missed the confetti moment.
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| No really, they used trumpets. Check out the ladies on the left. |
With the Kodak moment captured forever, the bride and groom hustle back up to the stage for copious photographs.
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| Now you can see all the confetti stuff. The staff began cleaning it up immediately, they were clearly not wasting time. |
Just like at an American wedding, lots of photographs were taken. I think photographs are extremely important--after all, memories may fade, but photos are forever.
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| The bride and groom with their parents. I think hanboks are gorgeous. |
I'm not 100% sure how the bouquet-throwing thing works in America, but I was always under the impression that all the women try to catch it and the one gets the bouquet is supposed to get married next. Here the tossing of the bouquet is just a photo opportunity. The bride's friend (just one) stands behind her, and the bride tosses the flowers back. This is repeated as many times as necessary to get the perfect bouquet-tossing shot.
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| Big family photo! Love the hanboks! |
After the ceremony and photos are done--which, like I said, took about 30 minutes total, is that efficient or what?--I went down to the reception/buffet with a few other coworkers. There are several wedding rooms in the building, and all of them go to the same buffet. Unfortunately I had eaten before coming--a horrible bulgogi burger, why do I make such bad choices when it comes to bulgogi?--but I did get my fair share of 'cake.' There wasn't a wedding cake, per se, but there was an assortment of Korean sweets. Here is a photo of my 'sampler plate,' in which I tried everything on the dessert table:
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| Oh yessss watermelon. |
Starting at the top and moving clockwise, I'll try to describe the sweets.
1) Green-orange thing: a rice cake with sesame seeds. Not sweet. Sadface.
2) Yellow muffin thing: it had a wee tiny drop of cream cheese inside. Dry.
3) Creamy delicious thing: no idea, possibly coconut? Delicious, I ate like 10 of these.
4) Watermelon, delicious. Seedless watermelon is apparently not available in this country though?
5) Ham-and-cheese sandwich. This was a mistake. No idea why it was on the dessert table, but once you grab something you can't just put it back.
6) Pink macaron? Not sure what it's called, but delicious. Ate several, in different colors!
7) Pink cupcake-thing with a cherry: again, no clue, but delicious. There were a few left on the plate and one woman took them all, and an involuntary noise of sadness popped out of my mouth. The woman noticed and gave me one! Thank you, strange stomach noises!
8) Taco-looking thing: thought it would be chocolate. It was actually meh-flavor with a filling of meh.
9) Tan-colored ball: this was a rice cake. It was not sweet. I cannot understand how this is considered a dessert. The tan stuff is a powder of some kind, it tastes healthy. Yick.
10) Yellow cake roll thing: yum! Moist and flavorful, unlike most Korean baked goods. I ate a lot of this.
11) Yellow ball: when will I learn that 'dessert' rice cakes are awful? When? Seriously, it's been 11 months and I still haven't learned?
I also ate a lot of shrimp. Yummmy shrimp. They don't devein the shrimpies in Korea, which is a bit disconcerting for someone not used to eating poop. I feel like a snobby cretin if I devein them, and I feel like a poop-eating cretin if I don't.
And now for a gratuitous picture of a little old lady in a hanbok, just because she looks awesome:
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| I'm so jealous. I don't have any cool culture or heritage with sweet clothes. |
There's one more wedding tradition that's worth mentioning: the hahm. I think this is the best pre-wedding tradition I've ever heard of.
Here's how the hahm works: the groom's family sends a box full of gifts to the bride's family. How do they send it? They get the groom's friends drunk and make them take the box. They then 'negotiate' with the bride and her friends, who tease the groom's friends from the balcony and eventually give them money in exchange for the gift. There's apparently much singing, yelling, and drunken revelry involved. Also, squid masks.
Now, when my coworker first told me about the hahm tradition of squid masks, this is what I imagined:
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| Cute! From google. |
Or...
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| Also cute! From google. |
Or maybe...
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| That is adorable. From piikeastreet.com. |
I was so very wrong. Here's what a 'squid mask' really is:
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| Ewwww. From seoulsisters.com. |
It's a dried up squid. A real dehydrated sea creature. It's considered a food, although it smells kinda bad.
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| Seriously, ewwwww. Poor squiddie. Also from seoulsisters.com. |
The hahm seems like a fun tradition, although apparently not many people do it anymore. Now that many people live in high-rise apartments, it's harder to practice. After all, you can't really negotiate from the 22nd story of your apartment building with drunk people on the ground. That'd certainly be noisy.
But Korean weddings aren't all fun and games. They're also insanely expensive. It's gotten so bad that the government has stepped in and started to introduce laws limiting certain financial aspects of weddings. According to some sources, the cost of the average Korean wedding is nearing $175,000 (that's not a typo), although this figure apparently also covers the cost of an apartment and all the furnishings and appliances, as well as the honeymoon. So maybe it's not that crazy? I don't know. When I get married (someday, many years from now) expect a backyard barbecue affair.
Going to a Korean wedding was an awesome experience, and I'm so thankful that I was invited. I've now been to a Korean wedding, funeral, and baby shower, so I think I've hit all three big life events! One day I'll write about the funeral, because it was very different from a Western funeral, but today is not that day. Until next time!
Cheers,
Ashton
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