She does, he does, CUE SYNCHRONIZED DANCERS

Let's talk about Korean weddings.

Yesterday, my co-worker Connie got married. Instead of getting gifts, Koreans give money for weddings. As co-workers we are required to give money whether or not we go, but we are also somewhat required to go.

I was excited to go anyway, seeing a Korean wedding was actually something I came here hoping to attend. Connie looked gorgeous. Her dress was lovely and MASSIVE. We arrived and took a co-workers picture with her on this massive couch thing in a room with carpets and shiny beads and fancy lighting.

We then hung out in the reception hall area for a while before sitting in the bride section of the weddingy area. Lets talk about the weddingy area for a second. It was a long room with black walls. There were small lights in the walls that did a twinkling star sort of a thing. There were also flowy flowery light up pattern things, and mirrored stands with purple flowers on them. Down the center isle was more or less a glass case runway. Inside the runway were more lights and glass/mirror flowers. There were also what I thought of as wedding stewardesses whose job it was to direct guests, and help members of the wedding who were either older, respected, or wearing heels to high to move around by themselves.

I have been told (and now seen for myself) that the success of a wedding is determined by how many people show up. I have also been told that there are like four degrees of separation between the actual people getting married and some of the people who show up. Like families of business friends friends sort of thing. Because of this, there was constant talking throughout the entire ceremony. A guy sitting three rows ahead of us was on facebook on his phone for about half the vows.

The ceremony began with the mothers of the bride and groom coming to the front and lighting candles. They were wearing hanboks, which are traditional Korean dresses. They are super beautiful and it was cool to see them as part of the ceremony.

The fathers came in and sat down, and then the groom, followed by Connie in her glorious huge dress. There was some sort of pre-ambley speech thing, and then vows.

This is when things started to become interesting and incredibly foreign. A man (I assume a friend of the bride or grooms) sang them a song. He had a gorgeous voice. The catch? He was reading the lyrics of the song off his cell phone as he was singing.

Next, a big tray with a wedding cake on it was rolled out. And the couple cut the cake. WITH A FREAKING SWORD. Then four women (friends of the brides) did a choreographed dance to K-pop. Like, Brittney Spears type choreography. Everyone loved it! Our co-worker Sue was in it, and she told me today it took them six weeks to learn.

They started a dance to another song, this time with pom-poms, and the groom jumped out and danced with them. He had clearly learned it without Connie knowing, she was surprised and cracking up, that was pretty adorable.

This is all happening while people are talking.

After the ceremony was over we were told we had to be in a picture, so we waited while family members were in pictures, and got arranged and re-arranged for 10 minutes before the photographer snapped some shots.

I think I have mentioned before that the documentation of events is as, or more important than the event itself. Even during the ceremony a friend of Connie's would jump up to the alter where they were standing to fix her hair, or bring her crying tissue, or arrange her dress perfectly.

It was a really interesting cultural experience. I had a blast seeing how it all went. The space was amazing and very fancy, and it was definitely totally different from what I was expecting.

Afterwards there was a big buffet, which was great. Our new coworker came with us, and we got to know her and spent the rest of the day with her and our other foreign co-workers. (All great people).

Work lunch and catch up

I am back! Hello!

Well before I tell you about the work lunch, I'll do a quick catch up. Things are still going well. Teaching is good. We are coming to a strange part of the year. In January students re-enroll in the program. This makes things stressful for the school on several fronts. Obviously they need a certain number of students to keep the school afloat. Also, they rework the schedule. They test all of the older kids to decide who should progress to a more difficult class and who should stay at their level or level down. Our friends and co-workers Joel and Jessica leave at the end of December as well. The two of them are being replaced by only one person (Amelia, who seems great). So that calls for some rearranging class-wise as well. Although none of this changes my current schedule, you can definitely feel the strain of management freaking out. I'll be interested to see how it all works out in January, but there isn't much I can do about it now.

On a less ominous note, Christmas is coming! It's really strange to think of Christmas away from home. My family has gone to Pittsburgh to see my Mom's whole side of the family every year for a looooong time. I am the first to miss a Christmas (except for when my cousin got sick and destroyed Christmas, but don't worry, we rescheduled). It will be hard not to be there this year. Oddly, it helps me to think that our Christmas' won't be on the same day! The 25th comes to Korea a day before the US. But we have a big Christmas party to go to with friends. The lovely people we replaced left us a Christmas tree, and gifts have been seriously pouring in from Ben's and my family members. Our apartment is very festive and we have good people to celebrate with.

So now to yesterday. First of all, it was Ben and my 3 year anniversary. That's crazy. We had to go into school on a Saturday for an open house/information session thing the school does to try and get more students involved. Our job was to dress nicely and look American/Canadian/English. We also bowed at one point. Videos of some of our classes were taken ahead of time to show the kids' language progression. They were actually pretty adorable. After the presentation was over, the school took all the employees out to lunch at a duck shabu shabu place.

Lunch was a fun but strange experience. I found it to be kind of draining. Being the odd one out as far as fully understanding etiquette and Korean customs was a bit exhausting. The lunch was done as a sort of two in one holiday party/goodbye to Joel and Jessica. This is the second goodbye meal we've been to (the first was Johnny and Amanda's just a few days after we got here). Mr. Kim, the head of the school gives a speech thing, and then other people are asked to as well. All of the foreign teachers, including myself, stood up to say something to Joel and Jessica.

Then there were "In This Coming New Year" type speeches. I found the speeches given by the Korean staff to be bizarre (as did many of my foreign coworkers). I have found several times that speeches that have an uplifting "you guys are doing such good work" message always have a "but we have to do EVEN MORE" side to them. Also, there is some concern about the amount of money the school is making. In almost every speech given by management, there was a pretty clear message along the lines of "you guys are doing really good work. Please keep doing good work. The only way we can get more students is if we work harder." While I understand that teaching well and having the students be engaged and excited is very important, the idea that any teacher can do more than put their best energy into teaching to up enrollment is very strange to me. I consider it my job to teach the kids in my classes to the very best of my ability and with the best attitude I can. If I do a good enough job that the kids are happy and stay enrolled, or other kids and families become interested I guess that could count as DOING BETTER. But I'm not sure how much control I have over it.

Something to keep in mind (for you, reader, and probably for me too) is that these speeches were mostly given in Korean and then translated by our head teacher. So it's possible that some of the strange undertones came from being lost in translation. They were also all delivered in a very affectionate way that was clearly meant to be inspiring and motivational. Once again, cultural differences and the Korean work ethic have to be kept in mind.

It was a fun lunch despite the strangeness. There was good duck, and lots of chatting and laughing. Our head teacher Lynn had been pouring her heart and soul into the open house and was absolutely giddy when it was over. It was great to see her smiling and relaxed.

Another interesting note is about Korean drinking etiquette. It is very very common to have drinks at business dinners or lunches. The rules of this sort of business drinking are really complex and interesting. The top things to remember as they have been explained to me are: never let your bosses cup run dry, never fill your own glass, but be sure to fill the glasses of anyone around you who is drinking, face away from your boss when you drink, and when someone is refilling your drink hold your glass with two hands. (Actually taking and giving things to others with two hands applies to everything, not just booze. It's a respect thing I actually really like, it makes passing something less haphazard. It shows that you are putting bodily effort into taking or giving something to someone.) ANYWAY. Fortunately, because I am a female and foreign, people filling up the cups (mainly my boss) were less pour happy with mine then they were with the men.

 It was another interesting experience. Later that night Ben and I had a nice dinner out, and after getting incredibly lost and wandering for an hour and fifteen minutes looking for our meet up point, joined our friends downtown for a great night of dancing and singing (at a nori bong, which is karaoke where you get your own couchy room with your friends). Then there were glorious 5am kebabs, and sleep by 6. It was a great day.
Next weekend we are going to a Korean coworkers wedding. Korean wedding! I am psyched. I will most certainly have something to say about later!

Thanksgiving

We got an oven. Thank goodness. And we got it before Thanksgiving. Also thank goodness. And we got a box full of spices. Glorious. And a beer brewing kit! White Elephant IPA is soon to live in my home.

BUT! Thanksgiving!
So early on Ben and I decided we wanted to host Thanksgiving. We are big cooking people and we like having people over. We have hosted international Thanksgivings before so we figured we were good people for the job. We took care of the turkey and stuffing and did the rest potluck style.

The challenges: turkey. It's difficult to find turkey around here. There is a bar/restaurant downtown that caters to foreigners (and is run by foreigners) that sells holiday meat around the holidays. So for an arm and a leg we covered the turkey. 2. Bread. It's all puffy white bread here so Ben and I made bread. Fortunately Ben worked on a farm in Italy and made bread every Friday for 5 months. Convection oven. I love our convection oven, but it does take some getting used to and some recipe tweaking to use it. The turkey came out perfectly, the stuffing was a little dry in spots, but mostly pretty delicious.


We used veggies from the market and cooked for like six hours. We set up the apartment with all kinds of weird seating, different level tables, cheap table clothes, candles, and wine. But it looked awesome and we had a great turn out of people. It is pretty cool to be in a foreign country and have over a dozen people come over to celebrate a holiday with you. I am thankful indeed to have so many great friends who welcomed us so quickly.

Anyway, everyone brought AMAZING food. It took a lot of re-arranging just to fit everything. We all pigged out and then played cards against humanity (for those of you who don't know, this is the pg-13 version of apples to apples). There were tears of laughter involved. The last people left at 2:30 in the morning. It was a massive success.

As is proper, we have been living off the leftovers this week.
Christmas shopping has begun and we are looking forward to our next holiday in Gwangju.