Wow! A Korean Wedding

I want to spend some time getting blogs out today because I have a quite a few back-logged. I guess you could say I have a lot of back-logged blogs cloggin my noggin.

Anyway...this post is about a wedding I went to two weekends ago. The bride is a kindergarten teacher who used to work at my school. Here English name is Michelle, I don't know her Korean name.

I showed up with my neighbor Joe, and we were able to take a photo with Michelle right before the wedding started. Joe and I had both learned to tie a tie from watching internet videos about half an hour before this photo was taken. I think we both did a good job. Oh, and Michelle looked very beautiful in her dress:

The wedding took place in this massive wedding hall a few blocks from my apartment. The complex is about 6 stories, each with a waiting room and the wedding room. The wedding room isn't big enough for everyone, so when the ceremony started a lot of people just waited out in the other room and kept talking. It was pretty loud and I couldn't really hear what the minister was saying. It was just strange to me that everyone just stood out in the other room and didn't really care what was going on. People were even talking inside the wedding and it didn't matter. I guess that is just a cultural difference between Korean and the U.S.

The wedding hall had this super nice ceiling ornamentation:

The ceremony went maybe half an hour, then the bride and groom walked out and were shot with streamers:

There was a slight problem when dozens of the streamers stuck into the ceiling ornaments:

After that was photo time, so the whole family got together. There was also this dress maintenance lady who hovered around the bride and groom to make sure that their gown and tux were absolutely perfect for the photographs. She was dressed in jeans and an old t-shirt, but it didn't really seem to matter:

The photographer was another dude dressed in jeans, an old sweatshirt, and a backwards baseball cap. It didn't really seem to matter.

The whole wedding process took about an hour from the ceremony to the photographs with the family, and then there was another wedding ready to take place immediately afterward. It seems like with six stories of weddings in the place at an hour apiece, they could crank through about 50 to 60 weddings a day if they need to. To me it's like a wedding factory with no real sentiment to it, but I think in America it's also a bit overplayed so that they can sqeeze every last dollar out of you.

Despite everything that put me off about the process, it was still a nice time. I like Michelle and her husband, but I can't remember his name. We also had dinner which was all this weird seafood and unfortunately no cake.