Korean Weddings etc...

Hello all!

Hope you are well. I'm here to guide you through the new pictures I put up on the Kodak Gallery. You are invited to check that out as soon as your done reading this.

About a month ago, one of our teachers here at YBM, Son Hwa, invited all the teachers to her wedding. I was so excited to see a typical modern/traditional Korean wedding ceremony. So here it goes:

Most weddings take place in beautifully decorated halls in highrises. Seeing as she is Protestant (which they call Christian here; they make a distinction between being Christian and being Catholic) they had a spiritual Western ceremony with a very vivacious pastor who used his microphone to the full extent of its capacities. Even if you wanted to block him out, it was impossible. But I could see he seemed to really believe what he was saying and I learned a new word that day: 하나님(Hananim), which means God.

I was warned previous to the wedding that Korean weddings are typically very loud affairs and that I shouldn't get offended because a lot of people standing in the back of this open hall would be talking as if at a social event, which this kind of is. You see, the halls are not closed off and weddings take about 15 minutes. Actually, let me backtrack a little. First the bride goes into a tiny room for professional pictures before the wedding while the organizers hurry to set up the place for the new couple. Then the wedding takes place and basically anybody can attend it because the hall is open in the back where there is a hallway separating the ceremonial hall from the buffet area.

The tradition is to give about 10,000won (around 10 dollars) to pay for your meal. The buffet is huge and has a whole multitude of different kinds of food fit for a king. So we saw the fiery speech by the pastor/minister and then the tradition is to go take professional pictures with the newlyweds. First there are the pictures with the family, then there are pictures with co-workers and friends, so we got to be in that one! There is another roll somewhere in my plastic bag full of a dozen rolls of film with more pictures, but I'll just add them when I get around to developing them. After taking the pictures, we went to eat but only had about 30 minutes before we were kicked out (they had to prepare another buffet...). But we were to be treated by another amazing and, this time, very new experience for me: the traditional Korean Wedding ceremony.

Okay, so it was not exactly 100% traditional, but still... traditionally, the ceremony takes place at the bride's house (in the garden) and the groom comes into the garden riding a horse and the bride is being carried in a kind of man-held carriage of the olden days...now, most Korean weddings take place in halls after the Western style wedding is over and that's what happened that day. We went to a much smaller room where Son Hwa was already dressed in all her glory in this gorgeous red wedding hanbok.

Traditionally, red is a symbol for celebration and white a symbol for death, actually quite like India. Today, close family members of the deceased people still wear a traditional white hanboks, specific to funerals, but most other people have reverted to wearing black. So, there are a good number of pictures of this traditional Korean wedding with the appropriate explanations per picture. Feel free to make comments or ask questions.

After the wedding I went to have coffee with the Korean teachers. It was a really nice time that day. Aside from the Korean wedding, I have had some other cool experiences. My former boss asked me to check out the universities that they have partnerships with so I arranged to have a tour of Korea University, one of the most prestigious universities in Korea. It was a gorgeous campus and probably the most hi-tech university I've ever seen with amazing computer and multimedia labs. Anyway, I took some shots of the typical colors we could find in the city during the fall. Gorgeous colors!

My current boss invited some of the teachers to see a Premier League Soccer game at one of the World Cup stadiums a few weeks ago. And of course, it had to be the coldest day of the year so far that day with about -11degrees Celcius. We were jumping up and down trying to stay warm while the manly men plied themselves with beer to stave off the cold.

After the game, I was convinced to go out for dinner though I was tired and I'm so glad I was encouraged to do so. We went to a typical Hwe restaurant for dinner. Hwe is the name for raw fish in Korean. We had flounder which was excellent and when asked what follow-up dish we wanted, Todd suggested the wonder of wonders...live baby octopus (sannakji)! I was totally for it. So we ordered it and when it arrived, the little suckers were squirming all over the plate! It was crazy! I wish I had had a video camera to be able to show you how impressive it was. Some of the tentacles were even moving off the plate!

The dish was garnished with slivers of raw cucumber and sesame seeds and we had to dip the octopus in sesame oil before putting it in our mouths. We tried to get the things with our chopsticks but it was impossible. They were sticking to each other and to the plate so we had to take them with our fingers. They stuck to our fingers! I finally put it into my mouth, all for the extraordinary experience, and I felt the tentacles sticking to the inside of my mouth, suctioned fast. It was such a strange and alarming and cool experience all rolled up into one! I had to chew very quickly to get it to stop sticking. It was a lot of fun and it was actually quite delicious! We washed it down with sansachun, my new favorite Korean alcohol beverage which tastes a bit like white wine.

Well, those are my experiences up to date! There are a few extra pictures that are randomly added but are explained at the bottom of the pictures (as are all pictures, of course)

Love!

L