Our Korean Wedding, Part 3

Around this age is when a fair few people choose to get married. A lot of friends have already been married, and some have weddings in the next few months. 27 years old seems young and I often ponder whether we should have waited longer. But in the end I always come to the same conclusion. And that is that when you're as sure as you'll ever be that you've found the right person, there's no reason to wait any longer.

Heather and I are both lucky enough to have great friends and supportive family. When I was younger, I thought I'd like to have a very quiet wedding with only a couple of close friends around. In the end, it's up to the couple whether they want a big wedding or a small one. Ours was medium-sized and turned out to be just the way we wanted.

Isn't she lovely?

All of the photos on this wedding post are taken by friends of ours. Lots of them are from Jef Robison, including this one, and there are some taken by Brandon Na. Thanks guys.

We started eating dinner around sunset. The Kitchen is our favourite restaurant in Korea, and we had met the chef a few months earlier to discuss the wedding menu. He's very talented and capable, with a good sense of creativity. Heather and I were probably the last to start eating, and a lot of the good things had been finished by that time, but it didn't matter.

You need to save space when you know there's champagne coming later.

In this photo I'm wearing a traditional hanbok, which Heather and I changed into. I don't have any good photos of us both wearing them, but we'll probably receive some from the agency photographer later, which I'll post sometime.
When people had finished eating, my Dad, my brother and I gave short speeches. While I quite like public speaking, the question is, what on Earth do you say at your own wedding?

Well, I thanked everyone else who made the day possible, and then I talked about how lucky I was to marry my wife.

And to wrap up the dinner, Heather's younger brother (Jang-Ho) and his friend performed a Korean song for us. They had been practising a fair bit and Jang-Ho had only started learning recently. The performance was quite humourous and had a good feeling to it.

Then it was off to Round 2. Jun is one of Daniel's friends, and is one of those Korean older brothers you have with an 'interesting' network of characters. He and Roman organised and decorated this wedding car for us. The car was brand new and actually had a sticker on the driver's seat that said "To Be Delivered". I think he had to return it to the car shop later.
Jun drove at around 15km/hr and had made a romantic playlist of 1980s classics for us to listen to. Thanks Jun!

We were lucky with the venue for the second round. A new bar called Paris had just opened on the second floor of Anthony's apartment. So Anthony and Rebecca went down to talk to the owner a few weeks before the wedding. The owner is a fairly young guy and offered to reserve us a section of the balcony for free. Even better, we were allowed to bring our own drinks with no corkage charge.
The bar is right on the beach at Gwangali and has a view of the bridge. A perfect venue for the second round. Thanks go out to the owner of Paris (Cavin), as well as Rebecca and Anthony!

If you're in Busan sometime in the future, consider visiting the Paris Bar on Gwangali Beach and giving them patronage. It's on the second floor next to the Homer's Hotel.

Two of Heather's bridesmaids, Ellie and Heidi.

These are the two folks I used to work with in the old HR department at Injung Education (CDI). On the left is Kelly, who is in the middle of traveling around the world, and on the right is Brandon, who now has a radio show on Busan eFM.

Here's Nathan Saler, Jennifer Pejic and Jef Robison.

Dad, Heather and me.

We're smiling for all the blog readers out there.

Our photographer had gone home earlier in the night and I haven't been able to track down many photos with some of the other guests. As a blogger, you know you had a good time when you are missing large chunks of the night in the photo record.

Here's Cavin, the owner of Paris Bar. In this photo he's pouring a special wedding fountain for us. After pouring the alcohol on top, he engulfed it in flames and then someone else made it sparkle with flint.
The flames were put out, and then Heather and I drank it together. It tasted fruity.

Our favourite celebration drink is Moet and Chandon. On the night we brought in 15 bottles with both brut and rose' on offer.

I remember clinking glasses, but the rest of the night is just a warm fuzzy memory.

We woke up the next day at the Aqua Palace Hotel and opened the curtains to a very fine day of warm sunshine. The day after you get married, it's fun reflecting on yesterday. It's also tempting to contemplate in what other ways the wedding may have turned out if such-and-such had happened, but this is a temptation worth resisting. In the end you take it for what it meant to yourself and others, and then it's time to focus on being a good husband.

I'll post some odds and ends from the wedding at a later date, but next up on Lee's Korea Blog is the 2-week honeymoon. We packed a lot into those two weeks, and it will take me around a month to get it all up on the blog.

Here's hoping that you'll find it interesting!

Our Korean Wedding, Part 1

We arrived back in Seoul on Monday and are settling into the pace of normal life again. The wedding was great and the honeymoon was fantastic, with many good friends helping out at every step of the way. Now I need to sift through around 1000 images to share with you all, starting with the wedding.
That leaves me with an interesting problem: How exactly does someone blog their own wedding appropriately? If I were to keep the photos private, that wouldn't be very nice. And as soon as I start blogging it, I can sense that it will inevitably become a slight misrepresentation of our special day. This is a dilemma that we'll just have to get by with.

Anyway, let's start.

We woke up at Heather's house early on the morning of September 19th. Heather's mother had already gotten up at 6am to start cooking breakfast for us, and when I went into the kitchen she was still busy chopping things up. When you are about to get married, the 2 questions that people ask you most often are "Are you nervous?" and "Are you excited?"
The two answers that I would truthfully have to give on the morning of our marriage would have been "Not really" and "A little bit." Heather and I were feeling pretty calm about the whole ordeal, but things do get stressful as the ceremony approaches. It's not that the wedding isn't special, it's just that you don't seem to become noticeably overwhelmed with feelings as you might expect. For me, the time was spent focusing on the things that had to fall into place for everything to go well. A lot of planning had gone into that one day, and when it arrived, I thought that all we should do is just let it happen and hope everything works out.

And luckily, it did.

The wedding ceremony was due to start at 5pm, at an outdoor location on a hill overlooking the ocean. We woke up around 8ish, had a nice cooked breakfast and took things pretty slowly. Heather and I sat down at the dining table enjoying the calm before the storm. Weddings can be especially stressful for the bride, and I did have some worries that Heather might be a little under pressure. But sitting there at the dining table, picking at her mother's banchan with chopsticks and making little quips at the previous day's events, she seemed just as normal as any other day.

At 1pm we arrived at the wedding agency. The role of the agency was to organise the clothing and decorate the venue, as well as make sure things went smoothly. Weddings are like funerals, in that there's a lot of money to be made because people are more likely to spend lavishly. Our wedding agency had pre-wedding 'photography packages' on offer, the minimum being US$500. What you do is dress up nicely and have studio shots taken, which they put in an oversized photo album. Probably the strongest reason why you should get them done in Korea is because everyone will ask you whether you've done it or not. We opted out of it, just because it did seem like a silly amount of money, and how much does film cost these days anyway?
Instead, the agency provided the usual inclusive service of photographing the actual ceremony, and we also had Heather's friend, Adonis, come along and take photos of the day with his rather large Canon EOS. He took the photo above of me and Jang-Ho (Heather's brother), waiting in the wedding agency while Heather was having make-up done. All of the wedding photos on this blog post (and the next) were taken by him. Thanks Adonis!

This is what we looked like after we were both dressed up and had our hair and make-up done. As you can see, Heather's dress was impressively large. She had an ajumma helper who hurried around like a worker ant, assisting the oversized queen ant to move around.

On the left is our lovely ajumma helper, who instructed us on all the things we needed to know about the ceremony. There's a lot to remember on the day, not just what happens in the ceremony, but also little things like how you should hold your hands in a photo and how to exchange wedding rings properly. Rehearsal is the best way to go, but we didn't have enough time to go through everything from start to end.

We arrived at the wedding venue at around 4pm. In the photo above is me standing in front of Haeundae beach, which would serve as the picturesque backdrop of our ceremony. The venue was the Korea Art Centre on Dalmaji Hill in Busan, with catering done by The Kitchen (the restaurant where we got engaged). The ceremony itself was held on the sixth floor terrace, which is an outdoor location on the top of the building.
Most people in Korea get married at special wedding halls, which hold multiple ceremonies per day. They're nice enough, and necessary for such densely populated cities. But Heather and I wanted something different, so we asked The Kitchen if they could do it for us. It was the first wedding that they had ever done, and was a little more complicated than expected. But I think it really paid off in the end.

Heather arrived and went straight to the 5th floor to have photos taken with guests. Even 10 minutes before the ceremony started, she was still directing people and running the show from the confines of her 'bride hut' photo room.

What a star.

Here's Heather and her older sister. Korean female family members usually wear traditional hanbok to weddings.

Here are The Farrands with the latest addition to the family. Dad and Chris made it all the way from Australia to be at the wedding and it was fun showing them around Korea. I was saying to Dad, that because I'm adopted and marrying a Korean, I think we're starting the first Asian Farrand lineage in history.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Heather is always pretty photogenic, but on that day in particular she was even more beautiful.

A lucky man and a (fairly) lucky woman. Tee hee.

I've never had any doubts about marrying Heather.

We had photos taken for around 20 minutes, with the photographers placing us in all manner of photogenic positions. Luckily Adonis's photos are of good quality, because the photos from the wedding agency still haven't arrived yet. It might have something to do with the fact that Heather's older sister is still bargaining with them over the price they're charging us. She's good at that sort of thing.

The ceremony started on time, but it still seemed like 'all of a sudden'. We had rehearsed a little, but the whole thing felt pretty surreal at the time. On the sixth floor, music started playing and the wedding procession began. First Mr Kang walked up to the stage, with music from a famous MBC drama playing. Then came my Dad and Heather's mother, followed by four of my friends and four of Heather's friends walking arm in arm.

Jef Robison is a very good friend who I came down to Busan with on a near-legendary coach bus back in 2006. He knew Heather and I before we started dating and is the only person left from the original Busanjin group that is still in Busan.
The other friends I had chosen in this part of the procession were Daniel Pak, Anthony Nguyen and John Bernardi. I declined to choose a 'best man' for the ceremony, because there are too many best men here and abroad and it's too hard to choose one.

Then I came along, walking to the music of Love at First Sight by Kylie Minogue. I was smiling because I was happy, and also because everyone was clapping. It felt like I had achieved something great, and all I was really doing was marrying the one that I loved. So I was feeling great about something wonderful.

Then came our little flower girl, Ji-Ye. She was pretty bewildered by the whole event and throughout the day was calling my name a few times. When I said 'Yes?' she just looked at me sheepishly and grinned. In her part of the procession, she walked down the aisle and threw flower petals from a basket. She did a good job, and I've never seen her so focused and serious in my life.

Then came the bride with her father. I'm sure that this moment is one that will stick with us for a long time to come.

The father of the bride gave me his daughter's hand, and we turned around for the ceremony.

Heather's friends from the procession stood on the left. They were Ellie, Christine, Heidi and Rebecca.

And standing on my side were the trusty Boys of Busan.

The ceremony itself was around 30 minutes, and consisted of some Korean and Western formalities. Heather and I bowed to each other and affirmed our wedding vows, which were spoken in Korean by Mr Kang, who was our celebrant.

We were extremely lucky with the weather, because it rained just two days later. Mr Kang is our old boss from CDI, and did a great job with the ceremony. All in all, things went very well and we have a lot to be thankful for.

I'll follow up with the rest of the day's events shortly. See you soon!