THE BIG DAY PART 1

Finally, after all the planning and fretting the big day has arrived. It's been a fun cultural learning curve trying to plan a part Korean part British wedding ceremony. But we somehow managed to get there in the end.
It's hard to know where to start; It was such a wonderful, wonderful day... and yet it all seems like a blur to me now.

I suppose I shall just start at the beginning.

The first slightly surreal thing about our wedding was hanging out with Eun-mi while she received her makeup and got into her wedding dress, they offered to give me makeup too, but i politely refused. and then when asked what style I wanted for my hair I bravely told them I liked it just the way it was.

So then my brother, Stef, along with me and my wife to be, fully dressed and pampered all jumped into my friends car to drive to our wedding venue. So much for the English tradition of not seeing your bride until she walks down the aisle.

And so we arrived at 'Maybe Wedding hall', which despite it's dubious name was a good choice of venure. It's a stylish 3 story house type building perched upon the top of a famous hill in Busan called 'Dalmaji' (달맞이) which overlooks Haeundae beach (해운대).

When we arrived we spent the best part of an hour just having our picture taken in a very asian, staged kind of way. I felt particularly awkward in my tux which was a bit too big for me, but all the other tuxedoes were too small... or flashy white. But the photographer was good and quite well humoured so we had a laugh, even if the photos are cheesy it will be fun to look back on in the years to come.

Everyone looked fantastic, especially the Mothers who were wearing matched salmon-pink outfits, but it was strange to see my mother looking so tall since she is normally the smallest in our family. But I was so pleased to have family there with me, as well as a good mix of English and Korean guests, to be perfectly honest i'm not really sure what happened during the time before the wedding began, I know that there were various people doing various tasks and that the guests were supposedly mingling happily upstairs, although i'm not sure how much the different nationalities managed to communicate, if at all.

After the photos we attempted to have a quick rehearsal of the wedding... this was the only chance we would have to find out what was actually about to happen in the following hour... so we hastily rehearsed the running order, the processional timings, and the songs... all this without the bride who continued to have her photo taken with the arriving friends and family.

Although the practice was fun it was also somewhat in vain since I was soon reminded that I was in Korea, a place where plans are seen more as a rough idea, and are routinely changed at the last minute.
"There are too many people, You can't walk in down stairs", one of the wedding hall personnel said to me approximately 2 minutes before the ceremony began.
"So there goes our planned entry song timings" I thought to myself, just before being hurried into the wedding hall...

As soon as the music started I realised our rehearsal really had been for nothing: soft emotional piano music was playing away as the processional began, not the music we had chosen and rehearsed together, somehow the person in charge of the music hadn't been present when we practiced earlier. Anyway the good thing is that I spent enough time in korea to know not to get upset when things slide from under your feet. If anything it made the event feel more classically Korean.

So it was a bit of a shaky start, but as far as I can remember I wasn't shaking inside, seeing my beautiful bride come in, and then walking down the aisle together was, for me, a huge sigh of relief, to have finally begun what we had patiently anticipated for so long: entering into a lifelong marriage covenant.