UK Trip: Peterborough

It's finally here. The beginning of my series of posts about my trip to the UK that happened in August of 2011. If I properly blogged that entire trip, it would take about 25 posts or so. Instead of doing that, I'm just going to post my favorite pictures from each city that I visited. That will be much easier.

With that, I'm going to get it all started with Peterborough, England. The city is actually pronounced more like 'Petahbrah' to the locals. It was our home city, in a way. Summer and I stayed there for a while with Roger, a friend we met in Korea. He was nice enough to let us stay with him in England, and he also drove us around the country. It was really nice of him.

We stayed at his house with him and his mother. When we were there, the neighbor kids almost constantly were knocking on the back door to come and say hi and see what we were up to.

This is Summer enjoying a juice box while walking around the city.

Just a random building in Peterborough.

This was a pretty great Chinese restaurant that we ate at run by a man from Hong Kong.

Summer always did the ordering when we went to Chinese restaurants. She would usually order about 5 dishes, including appetizers, soups, and main courses. It always ended up being way too much food.

Peterborough has a pretty impressive cathedral. I don't remember why Summer is laughing here, but it made for a nice picture.

One day we went for a walk along these train tracks of an old timey train.

Here is a boat with a pub in the bottom of it and a Chinese restaurant on the main floor.

I'm not even sure why, but I like this picture of the sky on the day we went to Roger's son's wedding.

Here is a picture of Isobel, you may remember this picture from when I posted it as a painting.

A lot of confetti was strewn about while we had drinks and socialized in the yard outside of the wedding hall.

Roger, dressed in his salsa dancing outfit before he performed during the reception.

Summer, dressed in her salsa dancing outfit before she performed.

A picture of our pint glasses at the Peterborough Beer Festival. It was a nice time, and over 300 'Real' ales were available for drinking.

This the immense wine aisle at a Tesco. Tescos are all over the UK. The larger ones, like here are a bit like Walmart on crack.

UK Paintings, pt.10

I'm going to try and finish up these painting posts, so I can get on with some other stuff. I have three trips during my recent vacation time that I would still like to post some pictures of. Then, more posts are sure to follow as I go back to...wait for it........Korea. Keep reading and I'll keep writing.

This painting is from a wedding I attended in Peterborough, England. The groom is the son of a friend whom I met in Korea. The bride, pictured is attempting to remove the part of her dress which got caught in a chair while walking down the isle. It made for a great photograph, and a decent painting:

I love how all of the texture turned out in this, but her face came out way too dark. I kept trying to put some yellow color on her face, which caused it to turn out green. Oops.

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.