Restaurants Cont. "Jun"

I think that "Jun" translates as "Fried". But this is not anything like greasy fried food we might be familiar with. Korean Jun is egg fried vegetables and seafood, and has become a definite favourite of ours (so all visitors prepare yourselves). Ok let me try to label some of the above; at 12 o'clock we have mushrooms, 1 o'clock: oysters, 2 o'clock: peppers, 3: fish, 5:tofu, 7: stuffed sesame leaves, 10: more oysters, centre: kimchi, green disks above kimchi: pumpkin. All of which is very nice.

Seafood Jun

Now some Korean foods have accompanying drinks: Jun has makoli.

Makoli is alcoholic, and is also quite hard to describe in an appetising way, as it is quite thin and milky. But it is quite nice, and there are a lot of different flavours; chestnut, blackberry, apple e.t.c.


Just in case there is someone reading this who happens to be in Songchon and wants to try this out, a good place to go is up the main stretch (along baskin robbins and DD), then take the second right. The restaurant in about 50 meters down the road on the right and looks like this (the one on the right):

Our Korean Wedding

Well, not our wedding. We were just invited.

We had no idea what to expect from a Korean wedding, and actually only found out that our co-worker was engaged when we were given our invitations. As you can see the entire invitation is in Korean, and it is quite shameful that neither of us know the Korean names of the bride (our co-worker) or the groom. We had to meet a friend outside the building who made sure we didn't go to the wrong wedding.

I had heard from other foreign teachers how different the event as a whole is, but they, and consequently I find it difficult to put into words my expectations. Instead I will relate the events.

Korean weddings take place in a hotel sized building specifically designed for weddings. There are separate photo rooms for the bride and groom before the ceremony, then a wedding hall, and lastly a huge buffet.

Hotel Wedding Hall

The photo room: The bride (Amy) wore a western style dress for the ceremony, then wore a hanbok (traditional Korean dress) during a more private Korean ceremony afterwards.

The ceremony hall

The ceremony was very different to what one might expect to witness in England. The main difference being the behaviour of the guests. Firstly, the wedding room was open for people to come and go as they wished, which people did. While the hall looks quite big, there were not actually many seats, so a lot of people were standing at the back of the hall (us included). What we found quite surprising was that people were openly talking to each other and answering phone calls throughout the ceremony. The ceremony was not very long, perhaps 45 minutes, 15 of which was taken up by the groom's 5 friends singing to Amy:

Part of the reason for the ceremony perhaps being so short was that there were 16 weddings in the same hall that day, and Amy's was one of the early ones at about 10:30am. The knock on effect of there being 16 weddings in the same room in 1 day is that you don't get to choose any of the little details such as flowers or aisle decorations. They just stay the same for the whole day. The photographer I believe is included in the "package" too. We English people (especially the ladies) might not like the idea of not having total control over "our" day, yet on the other hand, this idea might sound quite appealing to some.

When the lights turned back on

One thing we had heard about was the buffet afterwards. Now this is not just me being being obsessed with food here, the post-buffet was a nice time to show each other pictures and have a chat. The food was also amazing...