It's Been Awhile...

So I realized this morning that it's been over a week (almost 2!) since I updated my blog! Whoops! This month seems to be going by so quickly, and there hasn't been any big trips so I haven't taken many pictures. But I will try to fill yall in on whats been happening best I can.

Two weekends ago (Oct 8th) one of my Korean co-workers got married! Everyone was invited, so we decided to go and check out what a real Korean wedding was like. It is definitely different from an American wedding in many ways!
First you must know that in Korea, your life from a young age is staged in pictures. They are crazy about taking photos of everything, so posing and stopping in the middle of things is completely normal. That was one thing that was different about the wedding, the photographers were everywhere, making them stop a lot during the ceremony to take pictures, and being all in there face about it. In our weddings, the photographers try their best to stay out of sight for the most part.
The second big difference was that people talked CONSTANTLY throughout the entire ceremony! They were talking to each other, on phones, playing games on their iPads with the volume up, I mean no one seemed to pay attention to the ceremony!
The last big difference was where the wedding was held and the reception. In Korea, they have special buildings just for weddings and the reception, so when you get there it's room after room just for weddings. They have 30 minutes for their wedding; literally it's a wedding factory. They are cleaning up and setting up for the next wedding before you even get out of there! And then for the reception, it's in the same building and you get a ticket for it when you give your wedding gift (just money, to cover food, but no other presents like back home). So you take your ticket to a big hall and give it at the door, because there are actually tons of people from all the weddings eating in the same room as you. It's just a huge buffet and you have to find your seating, and then you eat and leave! There aren't toasts or dancing because you're in there with a bunch of strangers from other weddings!
Alright I took a few pictures and videos to try to show yall what it was really like. It was a nice place (part of the Ritz Carlton chain) and the bride's dress was really beautiful!
First the mother of the bride and mother of the groom walked down in the traditional Korean dress called a Hanbok:

And then here's the groom waiting for the bride:

Then the bride and the groom, her dress was really pretty!

I took two videos, and you can hear how noisy it really was during the ceremony!

So that was my Korean wedding experience! It was definitely interesting!

Let's see, what else has been going on.... Oh I've been helping Bora (my boss) plan the Halloween party we're going to have at school! We were throwing around ideas at work yesterday about what we could do with the kids that day, and she said if we had enough stuff than we wouldn't have classes that day but just the party! So I told her all the things we used to do during the Halloween parties at our house when we were young, like bobbing for apples, the toilet paper mummy wrap game, trying to eat donuts hung from the ceiling by a string with no hands, a fortune teller, trying to guess the number of candy corn, the game where you put different foods in boxes and label it 'eyeballs' and stuff, and of course a costume contest! If I'm missing any good ones, let me know!
I've also gotten a lot of presents from students these past few weeks: really nice facial soaps from Guam, a bag of orange chocolates from Jeju Island, a box of hard candies from Japan, a bag of raw sweet potatoes, and a little box of thick rice cakes. I literally have a drawer full of food at work because I am given so much stuff! I've already used the soaps too, they are so nice!
The weather right now is so beautiful, all sunny and clear, but pretty cold! It gets down to 0 or 1 degrees Celsius at night (which is about 30 degrees Fahrenheit), but it's supposed to warm up a little bit this week and be in the 50s at night, 60s during the day. Here in Songdo, the warmest part of the day is in the morning, and then by about 2:30 pm it starts getting really cold again and cloudy. Because of the crisp wind here, the temperature always feels a lot colder! I had to return a jacket I bought because the pockets were fake (a girl needs real pockets!) so I'm hoping I can survive on my cardigans until this weekend when Cassy, Sam, and I are going back to Seoul. Then I'll myself a warm jacket to wear!
We're also in the midst of planning a trip for New Years, we only get Thursday and Friday off (Dec 29 & 30) so we don't have too long to travel, only four days, but we do want to try to go out of the country. We were planning to go to Hong Kong, but flight prices all of a sudden shot up and are now $1,000 so instead we're trying to go to Singapore! We're going to book our flight today, they are really good prices so hopefully that will work out! And it would be a nice break from Korea by that time because it will be soooo cold here and Singapore is tropical year round!
Anyways, that's it for now, I need to start carrying my camera around with me so I can update on the little things more!