Alla's Travels

Lucky for me, one of my good Korean friends invited me to accompany her to a Korean Wedding. I'm always pretty excited to witness a cultural ceremony and compare it to other multi-cultural traditions I'm familiar with.

If you're a religious couple in Korea, you may hold your wedding in a church -- which I think makes it more special and less rushed. Our friends wedding, on the other hand, was held in one of those Wedding Factories. 

These Wedding Factory Halls hold about half a dozen or so rooms, which serve as wedding halls for dozens of couples throughout the day. As you can imagine, its crowded, noisy, at times chaotic. Guests from various weddings occupy the same space, waiting for their couple to say their "I do's." Half an hour later, move on to the next "lucky couple."

Before the wedding, a bride sits in a separate room, posing for pictures, greeting guests and accepting presents (typically money). As the ceremony begins, mothers of the bride walk down the isle in traditional dresses -- Hanbok. Then the groom and later the bride take their walk to the altar.

After "I do's," the bride and groom bow down to the parents to thank them for bringing them up thus far.

Later, typically a friend sings a few songs to the bride and groom. Then, photographer snaps a ton of pictures, all in the same room. Everyone else makes it down to a food hall, where a typical buffet serves what seems like hundreds of guests from all the various weddings.

The bride and groom change into a hanbok and a suit, and greet and thank the guests down in the food hall. Later, they perform another ceremony, elsewhere, which involves the parents of the bride and groom throwing nuts into the bride's cloth pocket. Nuts represent the number of children that the couple will have. Only close family and friends are invited to this ceremony, so I've only seen this on the TV :)

So all the dressing up, prepping, planning, eating and celebrating is finished around 3pm! Yeah, talk about a special day...