The Beachcombers

This weekend I went to Ally's wedding in Busan (she's one of the Korean teachers at my school). The only disappointing part of the trip was the 300km/hr train there did not feel nearly as fast as I'd imagined. From there, though, it was all Korean faerie magic.

A Korean wedding is indeed different than one back home, but not neccesarily in ways that I expected. The garb was wild in about the ways I'd imagined. Standard bride and groom stuff, but the ushers had marching-band-esque uniforms, and the mothers of each wore traditional Korean dresses (pretty sure it's called a hanbok). This looked particularly surreal for the groom's mother, as she is from the Canadian prairies, and her first taste of Korea was just a week or so earlier.

The unexpected weird came in the ceremony, though. The entrance music for the bride and groom was... well his was the entry music for a soccer team - literally. The lights dimmed and dry ice steamed fog down the aisle and projectors shot lazer lightshows around the room. When they both got to the altar, a bubble machine blew bubbles around them and throughout the room.

The ceremony was a nice though - quick and effecient one of half english half korean and ultimately it's not all that different from any I've seen (save for the coninuous stream of bubbles and creative lighting). There were some performances at the end, one from a friend and another from one of Ally's kinderkids (I teach her too). She played violin - far too beautifully for a child of her age. I help her colour and put stickers in a book, and she's probably better at violin than I'd be if I started playing when she was born. Assuming I ever had more than a month's patience with musical instruments.

After the ceremony we had sushi and then set out for the beach. Busan is on the southwest coast of Korea, so it's got some nice beaches where warm salty moisture is the only thing seperating you from Japan. Overexcitedly, hastily, and haplessly I hopped into the water as soon as we hit the beach. This was hapless because I'd forgotten to take off my glasses, which fell off and disappeared into the blue again. Somewhere in the Sea of Japan there is a nearsighted crab thanking me.

I sat on the beach until dark, bleary-eyed, combing through sand for tiny shells talking to Ben, Mike, and a few of the girls from work who came along to enjoy the thing for which Busan is known. It was nice to hang out with some of the Korean coworkers outside of work; you don't really get to meet someone when you're in the office working with them.

Back in Seoul to round out the weekend, I killed a few hours on Sunday visiting the COEX mall. I dig this place. It's a lot more like the malls back home, than a lot of the shopping centres here, with more focus on individual stores as opposed to some mazelike conglomeration of independant minimarkets. They've got these little interactive projectors showing little minigames on the floor where you do things like kick pool balls into holes and play a little mini game of soccer. I never tried kicking at things myself though, as they were mostly monopolized by children playing-out Godzilla fantasies.

The rest of my weeklife in a nutshell: My hair is practically normal again and I've got some sporty new glasses. I start teaching on Saturdays this month. I'm trying to plan some sort of fun vacation for Chuseok (long early October holiday) - come hell or high water, I'm leaving this peninsula for somewhere. Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, or even Jeju island. The only obstacle is the highly overbooked flight schedules, since that's the Korean travel equivalent of Christmas.

As a parting shot, check out these absofuckingloutely adorable pictures my kids have drawn of me. The one on the left is from one of my Kinderchildren and the other is from a handmade card that another very clever student gave me.