Another Wedding, and Spring's Blessed Appearance

So spring has finally sprung! And not a moment too soon, either. It is blessed jacket weather, and I have even worn sandals! As is Korea's pattern, things here are sudden, and it literally just all-of-the-sudden lost its chill. Hallelujah.

Yesterday, I was fortunate enough to attend my second wedding in Korea, and this was for my gorgeous co-worker Keira. This was a very different experience from Gina's traditional ceremony, in that this is a modern, common Korean wedding. The weddings here are very fast, and this one in particular was held at an establishment I can only think to describe as a "wedding mill". Each room conducts about 8 wedding ceremonies a day lasting about 30 minutes each. When we arrived, the wedding before ours was already in progress, running through exactly the same routine as the one we would soon witness. Pretty perfunctory, with some cute, Vegas-style embellishments, no bridal party, everything perfectly timed and orderly. We were then all ushered down to the buffet floor, where the establishment has a constant flow of food, and wedding party after wedding party comes and goes throughout the day. We were eating and co-mingling with those from the wedding party before ours, and the wedding party after. No wedding cake, no standing in line to greet the bride and groom. And this was all very normal. Before attending this wedding I had already heard that Korean weddings are surprisingly different from Western weddings in that they're very short, and people eat, and then you're done. My co-worker Un-mi who was sitting next to me told me she wants an "American style" wedding where the ceremony has more depth and lasts longer. There are some Koreans who opt for that, but the standard is still the wedding mill.
Kyung-hee and I traveled to the wedding together. She looks oh-so-hip in those shades. She's always stylish, though. She just got back from a vacation in Japan and brought back the coolest clothes.

Here is Kyung-hee again posing by the framed wedding pictures that were unbelievably gorgeous. They take some seriously outstanding wedding pictures here in Korea - 'course, it doesn't hurt that Keira is drop-dead gorgeous and her groom has one of the most charming, contagious smiles I've ever seen.

See what I mean? Straight out of Modern Bride.

Here is the beauty in person. She is posing in a room outside the ceremony hall where people can come in and take pictures with her (see below). I can only imagine how tired here cheeks were by the end of the day.Here is the DYB Crew! I work with all of these lovely ladies at my branch.

This is the ceremony hall before the Vegas style lights and magic. The saxophone player was very good, but looked so bored the whole time. I can imagine it gets old playing the same song for endless weddings!

Here are the groom and bride's mothers dressed in traditional hanbok. Usually, the elder women on both sides wear hanbok, and the men wear suits. The most touching part of the ceremony was when Keira's mother cried after being bowed to my her new son-in-law, which then made Keira teary-eyed. It was very sweet.

Here is the groom!

The bride and groom both walked down the aisle through this heart-shaped flower thingie, which the employees then parted. A little corny, but cute nonetheless.

Now announced man and wife... I think. I don't understand enough Korean to have had much of an idea of what was happening, but methinks these things are pretty standard.

This was my favorite part - the cake. They don't actually eat it, they just ceremonially cut it. As I said, there was no cake at the "buffet" reception, no dancing, none of that Western stuff. But the best part was the multi-colored lights and the dry ice! If you look closely you can see it coming out of the bottom.

I had to miss church to go to the wedding, but I wasn't about to miss my Pamela Time. We met up later in the evening and enjoyed a bottle of wine in this little cafe near my house that I recently discovered. It was open-air, and it was really nice to enjoy these first notes of spring.

Below, I've included my amateur-as-all-get-out video of the traditional wedding song sung to the couple at the end of the ceremony. I thought it was very interesting. You can also see how most of the attendees aren't really paying attention, which was true throughout the ceremony. There was a hum of conversation from start to finish, which, again, is very common. Please enjoy my silly mug at the end of video - if you are not amused, at least I know that I was. :-)

The Longest Mile...

So, here I am, officially at 10 weeks and counting before leaving Korea. At this point, it feels like trudging through mud everyday, like the hours are dragging, and the finish line is so close, yet somehow so incredibly far.

I don't know why, either, because I'm busier now than I've ever been in Korea. There is little extra time, so it should be flying, but for some reason, it's not. I believe it's because this job has effectively run its course for me. There have been many changes to my schedule, one of which is that out of 32 different classes that I teach each week, 25 of them are exactly the same lesson. Yes, that's right, I teach EXACTLY the SAME LESSON 25 times a week. 25 hours of hearing myself say exactly the same thing, exactly the same material, making the same jokes, trying to make it all sound fresh again for a new group of kids... It's just really, really monotonous. And I am very, very ready to be done with this 6 day work schedule and have evenings free again like all normal people. I don't like teaching to groups of children at 10pm who are falling asleep. It makes me feel like a slave driver. I love the kids, though, I really do, and that's what keeps me going. I will not miss the job, but I will miss the children.

I think things will seem less endless for me, too, once this winter finally retreats. I did the math yesterday, and realized it's a full 6 months of winter weather here, from October until April. At this point there is some relief (it's in the high 40's to low 50's) but I've been wearing the same black, down-filled Gap coat for 6 months, and I will sing and dance a little "hallelujah" chorus when I can finally put that thing to rest. As the gentleman I met in the airport on the way here told me, Korea is a land of extremes, and I would say the 6 months of winter and 4 months of bleeding hot summer I've experienced here prove his statement true, at least as far as the weather goes.

After having spoken to a lot of my foreign friends about it, my feelings right now are apparently very common. Sometimes the last few months are the toughest, and then suddenly it's time to go and you feel you don't have enough time to spend with all the people you love before you leave. Oh, and I do love people here. Pamela will be the hardest to leave. We've ritualistically spent Sundays together (which is my only free day to see her), and she's become one of the closest people in the world to me. There are people you meet in life who you know are just temporary companions on the journey, and then there are those you meet who you know will be there from the start to the finish, and Pamela is the second kind. Whenever I wonder if God really provides for our needs, the unbelievable way He placed Pamela and me together is proof that He is a God of his word. She will be staying on here in Korea until God moves her elsewhere, but I know the distance won't matter. She is lifelong. Also, I'm very fortunate in that she'll be visiting me in California just a couple months after I leave, so it's only a temporary "good-bye".

I will be visiting Gina and Mauri in Italy on the way home. Plane tickets are already bought. It's hard to stay "in the present" when my mind is filled with thoughts of warm Italian countrysides, bike rides, red wine, sandals and dresses, and tasting freedom again. It's hard to put in a nutshell or to easily articulate, but Korea is a demanding country. People work very hard. Everyone goes to work and to school sick, works late, studies constantly, and barely sleeps. There is no culture of relaxation here, and no place for it. What once shocked me nearly a year ago now seems commonplace to me, but I still can't agree with it. Kids studying into the wee hours, their futures being dictated by one-chance-only examinations. Korean co-workers working 11 hours 6 days a week with absolutely no vacation time, attending meetings that start at midnight and last until 7am... There's a lot of good to be said for this diligence, but many Koreans have told me they don't want to have children in this country because they don't want their children to be raised in such a stressful environment.

But lest I paint a far too dismal picture...

Oh, how I do love thee, Korea. I adore your food - ah, the ENDLESS new things I have tried and have yet to try - and your beautiful and abundant trees. The kind-hearted people I have met, who have been so generous and have embraced me without question. I love your quirkiness, and how you change on a dime. Your public transportation is divine. I love your lack of cynicism, and the fact that sarcasm is non-existent here. I love that I can walk around alone at 3am and feel no fear at all. From the moment I stepped off the plane, scared and excited, you have proven to be altogether different from what I expected, and a wonderful and thrilling ride.

I question what the future holds for me. My dream is to sing, and there will always be opportunities for me to do that, but the biggest unanswerable question of my adult life is: How do I do what I love and make money at it? I don't know... I honestly don't know, but the urge is strong to keep trying, which means probably take another job somewhere in the States that I don't love, but that hopefully gives me some freedom to do what I DO love. And then I wonder, "How long can I get away with this? Until I'm 40? And then at that point, will it be too late to try something else?" Ugh... I hatehatehate these thoughts. I have prayed so many times that God would give me the passionate desire to be a teacher, or a nurse, or an interior designer - something that I could set out to do, and then start doing it and make money at it. Singing and songwriting, all of the creative arts are so nebulous, and success at them is so due to chance. It's frustrating.

But I think at times like these you have to ask the Deathbed Question (which is what I did before coming to Korea): When you're on your deathbed, what will you wish you had done? And I know down to my toes that on my deathbed, I would wish I had kept writing songs, and kept trying to make it happen. Whether in Korea, or the U.S., or wherever else on God's green earth we find ourselves, we have to keep fighting to do what we believe He's created us to do. So that is my only aim, is to keep fighting. The glory lies more in the hope than in the success, anyway, I think. Once we lose hope, we've lost everything.

I am not finished with this blog. I plan to see and do more before I leave - I am quite anxious for the cherry blossoms, which should make their brief and splendid appearance anyday now - and with the limited time I have I'm still trying to plan something interesting to do on my 34th (yikes!) birthday in May. So it's not a "good-bye"... It's just some pondering I needed to do. In this last and longest mile, I know there will be more surprises, and more highs and lows. After all, that's the way life tends to be.