Korean Weddings

Yesterday I played piano for a Korean wedding. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. The groom apparently works at my university, although I hadn't met him before. There was a quartet of people sang, and I accompanied them.

Most weddings don't happen in a church. There are these buildings called "Wedding Halls", and they are exactly what they sound like. The wedding hall we were in had five stories, and each story holds a wedding about every hour. The room is all set up with chairs and such. It was a really formal room, but a few things seemed strange to my Western eyes.

There were lights that functioned like stage lights. They changed color, and lit different backdrops and some of them sparkled as they hung from the ceiling. There was an aisle, but instead of having an aisle-runner like at a church wedding, it was a plexi-glass insert with some fake rose petals under it. It also had a light under it so the whole aisle glowed.

There was no wedding party. There were these two girls who were dressed in identical outfits. I'm not sure if they were friends of the bride and groom or if they worked for the wedding hall. At the beginning of the ceremony, they both stood at the front and bowed very deeply to the audience. The mothers of the bride and groom came up next. They were wearing hanbok, the traditional Korean clothing. They bowed to each other, then they each lit a candle and the girls escorted them to two chairs in the front. Then they bowed while the groom walked down the aisle. He walked down by himself after a lady who worked for the wedding hall announced that it was time for him to come, and everyone applauded. The groom bowed to everyone who was there too.

There was a cellist, a violinist and a pianist who played. But the music was very strange. They would play for about 15-20 seconds while someone was walking down the aisle, then as soon as that person got to the altar, they would stop. It didn't matter if they were in the middle of a measure, or if it was a good chord to end on. They just stopped. It drove me a little crazy ;-)

When the bride came down the aisle, they did play the traditional "Here Comes the Bride" song, and her dad walked her down the aisle. But there was none of the "Who gives this woman" kind of moment. As soon as they were at the end of the aisle, the groom took over and the dad sat down. There was some talking that I didn't really understand, and the group of Koreans I was with didn't speak enough English to translate it for me.

When they took their vows, they didn't stare deeply into each other's eyes. They raised their right hands and looked at the pastor. They weren't even touching each other while they took their vows. When it was time to kiss the bride, it wasn't really a real kiss. It was more of a photo-op moment, I think. The bride and groom posed until the photographer told them he got a good shot.

At that point, the bride and groom went and bowed to each set of parents, and that was pretty much the ceremony. After the ceremony was over, all of the guests were in pictures with the bride and groom. They did the normal pictures with the family, then someone pulled me up onto the stage to have a picture taken. This is particularly hilarious because I don't know either the bride or the groom, and I was the only foreigner at the wedding. I guess it is trendy to have the token foreigner as part of your wedding photos ;-) So, I'm going to show up in the wedding album of some random Korean couple and they can show their kids the foreigner who came to their wedding, or something like that ;-)

Then we all went to lunch. You don't give a gift or have a registry in Korea. Instead, there is a desk where you give an envelope with money. In exchange, you are given a meal ticket that gets you into the reception. We all walked across this bridge thing to get to the reception. There was a whoooooole lot of food there. I only recognized about half of it, but everything I ate was pretty good.

All said and done, the wedding and reception took about 75 minutes. It was pretty crazy!