South Korea/China: Leif-Eric and Eun-Young's wedding
Plus a morning stop at the War Memorial of Korea via Seoul Station and the subway.
As with the National Museum, we could have used more time at the War Memorial. The collection and presentation were very good. It's something we should have expected, but didn't properly appreciate after our diminished expectations in Malaysia. The collection of hardware outside is well preserved and very complete, while the memorials are also well done. Inside is just as well done, complete with multilingual presentations everywhere.
Lunch at the food court inside the Lotte Market before the wedding; the order your food at a central cash register, then pick it up at different serving stations seems to be standard in Korea (vs. dispersed registers/service in the US and Europe)-- with one exception. A Lotteria restaurant inside that looked a great deal like a McDonalds had their own registers.
Leif and Eun-young's wedding started after lunch. A 40 minute taxi ride from the hotel to the church, where 600+ guests actually showed up. The ceremony itself was fairly straightforward, but three performances and a video presentation added on to the length: Leif's friend Giro (sp?) sang, a string triplet, an opera singer, plus the video of Leif and Eun-young's story.
Pictures afterwards, then the reception was directly across the street at an art gallery that evidently cleared most of a room out for the reception. Instead of the 600+ people, it was only 100 or so-- not the massive event that was at the church. The costumes and ceremony were new to me, and the fertility part of the ceremony was... amusing is probably the best way to put it. Leif said much of what we witnessed is usually done in private with the parents only, and instead, it was out on display for everyone to see.
Afterwards it was over to the Intercontinential Hotel, where we snagged the private room at the club there for the after-party (displacing Versace), then later moved upstairs to the cigar/restaurant/bar at the top of the hotel. Awesome place for more socializing and wedding cake cutting. (Eun-young's cousin is the head concierge. Useful!)
