A wedding, and a visit to my grandfather's grave.

Went to a wedding recently.

It's a little different here.

I went with my uncle and my more fashionable cousin.

Ok. Usually, (due to Korea being one of those heathen cousins), weddings are usually held in so called wedding halls where people are crowded into classroom sized rooms (there were about 4 rooms in the place where we went, for a total of 4 concurrently run weddings, and yes, there is a tight schedule).

There's a very formal order to the program and there's also a weird fusion of western white weddings and traditional Korean wedding (weighted heavily to the western style, by the way). Every able family (i.e. working) family attending gives money (no gifts) to the bride and groom. Everyone then heads to the buffet bar upstairs and eats buffet (It was your average buffet, which wasn't saying a great deal).

The entire thing had a very roller-coaster ride feel to it. As in, there was no really anything you could do but strap yourself in.

My cousin commented that he doesn't know why people do it, that the while thing looks like a wedding factory and all kinda meaningless in the end.

Oh who got married? I dunno. It's one of very Korean things where someone knows someone else and you know the person who knows the first person so you're invited to the wedding. I didn't even get to meet or talk to the bride and groom.

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Also went to visit my grandfather's grave. It's nothing like what you see in six feet under. First, people are buried in very odd places (lack of real estate). So grandpa's buried on the side of a hill and facing the bushes.

The actual grave itself looks like the photos I've posted at flickr, they look like round mounds which sit above ground.

What you're meant to do is to take some food and booze and go to the grave and have a little picnic. You're also talk to the person as if they were alive and you pour some booze and set aside some food for the person as well (it does get eaten by the living, at some stage).

Also, you take fake flowers (living flowers for the living, fake - dead - flowers for the dead) to the grave.

But because the family is christian (well, our family isn't but everyone else is) we had a simple service and talked to the dead instead of the picnic.

daisung.