The Just Slightly Bizarre Weekend

Friday night consisted of tequila and noraebang...the interesting thing is that spell check wants me to change "noraebang" to "noradrenaline," which I guess could also be applicable. Noradrenaline would probably be more fun if artificially induced, but I do not condone the use of drugs in any way. Erm, well...the illegal drugs anyway.

Saturday turned out to be a lovely day, despite the foreboding weather forecast of rain. The joke was on them. I got to see two Korean universities face off in a match of American football. Yeah, that's right. American football. Here's a picture to prove it:
Notice the sell out crowd. Honestly, I think we were five of maybe twenty spectators who were not affiliated with one of the teams somehow. This was the regional championship, too. Kyungpook University vs. Keimyung University. I guess the winner gets to go to state finals? It was ultimately an entertaining match, with Keimyung winning 26-14. You may wonder how well they played. That's a reasonable thing to assume, don't you think? Well, it's your turn to make an assumption based on this: the jokes were coming pretty loudly from our section of the stands (luckily in English). There was no passing game, not the best running game, or use of strategy, or kicking ability. What's left? Um...the uniforms looked nice? Honestly, I understand that American football is next to unheard of in Korea. It makes sense that the players would have the ability of junior varsity high school players. I think we were subconsciously bitter because none of us could feasibly watch real American football due to the time difference. Also, they completely forgot the fact that football requires sexy cheerleaders to be fully entertaining. I'm going to write Lee Myung-bak a letter.


Now, the crux of this post: the Korean wedding. I was invited last week to my principal's son's wedding. No, I have never met my principal's son. I still can't tell you his name. Having now experienced it, I now know why I was invited. Koreans will probably tell you some traditional reason for it that includes male co-worker camaraderie or Confucian style elderly deference. The real reason is right here on World Class Flaneur. Money. It is customary for each guest to give money as a wedding gift. Therefore, when a Korean gets married, he or she makes it a point to invite as many people as he or she possibly can. The normal acceptable amount is 30,000 won (about $25) for acquaintances (or in this case, complete strangers) and 50,000 won for closer friends. The gift giving certainly seemed a little impersonal, but then, so did the entire wedding. You'd logically think, "Hey, the more people they invite, the more expensive the wedding will be, right?" Wrong.

In America, weddings are usually in a church, winery, historic site, country club, beach, back yard, etc. In Korea, a vast majority of weddings take place in a wedding hall. This particular one was called the Wedding Castle, and, as I understood it, there were going to be seven or eight weddings that day. There were three going on as ours was. Since it takes place in a public wedding hall (with a buffet lunch), it's OK to pack as many people as possible in. You rent the room regardless of amount of people.

As you come in, you get your meal ticket and you give your gift to someone who mans the gift table as though it were a soup kitchen. Give 'em your cash, get yer meal. Then, you sit in the back of the seating area (or stand) because you are not family or close friends. It's OK to talk and carry on a conversation during the entire wedding because it'll only last 20 minutes anyway and you probably don't know either party involved. The bride and groom come in together, in fairly cheesy fashion, in a cage that hovers over the crowd and moves mechanically from one end of the room to the other:
Then the bride stands in the back while the groom goes to the front alone. In case you can't see really well, they provide disco lights every twenty feet on the ceiling to help you. These will be flaring up throughout the entire ceremony. The bride is given away, much like America, but only after the mothers bow to each other in their traditional hanbok dress (which I guess bowing to each other is their way of dancing to the top 20 K-pop being played while they do so). I didn't understand much of what happened afterward simply because it was in Korean, but there was clapping and yelling and, wait for it...noraebang. The groom sang a karaoke song to his new bride. In the middle of the ceremony, they brought out the cake and cut it as though they were being shuffled through renewing their driver's license at the DMV. "Fill out this form. Put your eyes in here and read this chart. Fingerprints. Do you want to be a blood donor? Cut this cake. What's your mother's maiden name? Look at the camera. Don't smile." Also, I have no idea what happened to the cake they cut. Where the hell did it go? They just carted it off and distracted everybody with a nice piano piece while the minister and his cronies snarfed it down in the back.

Instead of kissing at the end to signify that they were now husband and wife in holy matrimony, the groom gave the bride's mother a piggyback ride down the aisle and back. In ancient Korea, this indicated that the groom was ready to bear the weight of his new wife's family, for he would now take care of them when they were too old to do so themselves. This was done immediately before the dowry of three pigs, a goat, and 5,000 won was transacted. I completely just made that up.

This was the end of the ceremony. The bride and groom walked back down the aisle, but instead of leaving, they stood at the end of the aisle in the back and greeted people as they left. Before the wedding pictures got underway, it was understood that the guests were to go downstairs to the mess hall and get some grub. Here, you use your meal ticket to prove that you indeed were attending a wedding and not just getting a free meal, and burst at the seams with buffet style goodness. Eventually, the bride and groom come down in traditional Korean dress and join whoever hasn't already left, which is probably only their parents. Honestly, including lunch (which was buffet, so you know I stuck around for a while to get my money's worth), I was in and out of there in an hour and a half. Shortest wedding ever.

Now don't get me wrong. It sounds like from the rest of this post that I have a negative feeling toward the Korean style wedding. Also, I'm not positive, but I am under the impression that there is a second, more sacred, ceremony involving only children and parents. That speculation aside, there is something to be said for the Korean wedding ceremony. It was certainly more fun than an American ceremony. You could talk, clap, and sing along to the noraebang. You didn't have to observe silence like you were actually attending the funeral of your friend's/family member's bachelorhood. The disco lights helped too.

The reception (what reception?) was certainly lacking. Now, if we could somehow combine the two and have a bomb-ass Korean wedding ceremony with singing and performances and the bride and groom coming out to a theme song raising the roof like they're professional wrestlers with a bomb-ass American style wedding reception with maybe a friar's club style roast...I'm thinking best wedding ever. New goal for my life. Is that...feminine that I just planned out my dream wedding?

Anyway, I closed the weekend with a trip to Costco and the gluttony that inherently goes with it.