Korean Job Discussion Forums

[anae]

Hi Corporal

I have been married to a Korean man for four years. When we got married back in '99 we opted for a traditional Korean wedding and skipped all of that tacky wedding hall stuff and its expense. We hired a wedding planner in Chonju and she arranged everything. All we had to do was show up. The cost of the ceremony was 900,000 won and included the venue (beautiful Confucian school), costumes, officiators, photography, video, pyebek food, hair and make up, and all of the necessary things for the ceremony (fruits, plants, wine, live chickens, sedan chairs etc).

The money that was received from my in-laws guests went to pay for the two banquets we had in local hotels, the tour bus that brought the guests and the cost of my jewelry and our hanboks. The money from our friends and that which we received at pyebek paid for a good portion of our honeymoon.

If I had to do it all over again, I would still go this route. The ceremony was very dignified and meaningful for us. It meant a lot to my in-laws that I respected their culture so much that I wanted a tradtitional wedding.

This type of wedding is also ideal for figures in transition. My Australian friend got married in this type of ceremony eight months pregnant and looked beautiful in hanbok.

Just my two cents.

[Ody]

[Holyjoe]

This might seem like a stupid question, but how long did it take you guys to get legally married.
And by legally married I mean all the to-ing and fro-ing from the embassy to the gu-office and the like.

From what I can gather from the UK embassy website, we'll have to go to the embassy, do a wee thing there with forms/swearing on oath, then go to my girlfriend's gu-office (Gwanak-gu, a fair distance from City Hall area) and then back to the embassy again.
That's assuming there's no problems with any of the forms, I read someone somewhere who said they made a mistake on one of the forms and it meant an extra trip.

I'm going to have to go through this whole rigmarole soon and I was wondering whether I'll need to take a day off work, or whether it's accomplishable in a morning (I usually start at 3 or 4pm but I live around 1 hour outside Seoul)

Any ideas/anecdotes?

[anae]

We did the paperwork over several days. We filled out the forms at the embassy before the ceremony. It took only a couple of hours - but I took the morning off because with the Canadian embassy you just never know how long stuff will take. My husband went to the Gu office without me after we came back from our honeymoon that didn't take more than an hour. Then I went back up to the embassy to show them the paper work on another morning.

[taegu girl]

i got married in korea 3 years ago to a korean also. we had the great option of using a TEACHER wedding hall (which you can use for free if your spouse/fiance is a public school teacher or has a close relative who is- my husband's sister is a teacher). Because of not wanting a fast paced wedding, we scheduled ours for the last wedding that day. i think it was around 3pm sun. So, no one was behind us waiting for their turn. That was a stress releaser in and of itself-no push to finish quickly . I told my husband i didn't want to be sprayed by that stringy crap they have after the ceremony was over. We had a bilingual ceremony. the speaker was 70,000 won. THe music was provided by my husband's brother's friends for free. Renting my wedding dress,his tux, makeup, and pictures was 1.2 million won. HOneymoon to CHejudo was paid for by my parents ( i think around 1 million won). we had 250-300 people attend so the reception for eating was around 6 million won but that was paid for basically by the money given to us by guests. Rings were around 600,000 altogether. No hanboks were given or <A TITLE="Click for more information about gift" STYLE="text-decoration: none; border-bottom: medium solid green;" HREF="http://search.targetwords.com/u.search?x=5977|1||||gifts|AA1VDw">gift</A>s exchanged between parents. My husband already had an apartment so we didn;t have to pay to set that all up. SO, it can be done cheaply and i loved my wedding. it wasn't gaudy. BTW, we had wanted a church wedding but this was almost as private as a church wedding would have been so it was fine. MY parents in law did most of the arranging for the wedding but we did make it clear to them about certain things that would be included that were different than a normal korean wedding (we had a flower girl and ring bearer). hope this info. helps