On April 5th, I was invited to Jeong Mi's, one of my co-teachers, wedding in Daegu. Having never attended a Korean wedding, I thought this would be a good opportunity to catch a glimpse of Korean culture: pure, unadulterated, and away from any Western influence. I suppose that's what I got. As Changhoon said, "once you've seen one Korean wedding, you've seen every Korean wedding." Overall, my expectations were way off. Here's what we saw:

So most Koreans get married in these large wedding halls, rather than a church. They are usually several stories tall and able to accommodate several weddings at once. They are, as a fellow foreigner so aptly put, wedding factories, built to churn out as many weddings in a day as possible. Maria and I went with another one of my coteachers, Ah Young, and there were tons of people in the lobby (I was not surprised by this. This is Korea, after all.). 

Jeong Mi's wedding was on the fourth floor, so we headed up there. We were early, so the previous wedding was still in the wedding room taking pictures. Jeong Mi sat in a side room with a couch and lovely chandelier taking pictures with anybody who wanted to. This was our first clue that everything about Korean weddings is meant to be a perfect photo opportunity. This went on for some time, with the wedding attendees filtering in (and the previous wedding filtering out). Ah Young said that some people come, take their picture with the bride, go eat lunch in the dining room (more on this later) and then leave without attending the actual ceremony. How nice of them. After a while, the elderly people took their seats in the wedding room. There were only maybe 100 or so seats in the room, so the rest of us stood in the hallway....and chatted! The wedding happened with or without the audience's attention! Jeong Mi and her soon to be husband walked into the wedding room without as much as a canon in D. In the actual room, though, the wedding was definitely a production, with flowers lowering whenever somebody walked down the aisle, and loud music and an announcer to make sure people knew (whether they cared or not).  I can't say I understood much of what was going on. There was an officiant of some sort, but not a pastor. There were vows of some kind too. A live quartet played music throughout. There was no audience participation, besides for applause. At the end, the groom's friend sang a song and the groom joined in. He was an awful singer, and everybody knew it, including himself. 

After the wedding, which took maybe around 20 minutes to a half hour, there were the typical family pictures on the, well I hesitate to say altar, so stage center? They also had pictures with friends and coworker groups. Guess who were the only two foreigners in that picture...

Now it was time for lunch. The thing to do in Korea is to give the married couple money in these envelopes the wedding hall provides ($30 is customary I guess for friends who aren't extraordinarly close). In exchange, you get tickets to the wedding hall's buffet. Instead of a private room with the wedding's guests, however, there is a massive cafeteria where

all the building's weddings congregate and eat. And it was crowded (surprise, surprise). But the buffet was MASSIVE. Holy moly. It reached from one end of the room to the other, and then split off perpendicularly on either side. There was everything from octopus to spaghetti. Korean imitations of western food range from decent to disgusting, but this wedding hall's potato wedges were out of this world delicious. I put such small increments of stuff on my plate because I wanted to try as much as possible, but I had to go back for more of those potato wedges. There were barely 4 seats together for us to sit together (our school's special education teacher, here in orange, joined us for this part of the day). 

We sat and ate for a while.  Jeong Mi and her now husband came down to the dining hall in colorful Hanbok to greet friends and family, the ones they could find anyway. I was glad we got a picture with them. Her husband is very nice and they look like a great couple. With more people filtering in, and no party to feel obligated to stay at, Maria and I peaced out about 2 1/2 hours after we first walked in, hardly a whole day commitment like American weddings. Overall, I found the Korean wedding system to be a little impersonal for my taste. I have no idea how much the wedding itself was catered to Jeong Mi and her husband's preferences, but my guess is not much. There is a system in place, and you follow the flow of things. Here are some other things we learned about Korean weddings.

• This system has been in place for a while.
• It's unusual for people to meet on their own terms. It's popular to meet through dating services and professional matchmakers.
• If a bride or groom doesn't have many friends, they can hire fake friends to fill in the gaps and make them look more popular (who will know?)

And that was the Korean wedding experience.