When I was younger, I was always curious how my wedding would look like. I’m happy to announce that last Saturday, October 16, Suna and I had our wedding ceremony. It was nothing I could have imagined then,held in Daejeon South Korea, which is in the center of the country, we had a traditional Korean ceremony. Which actually is not common anymore in Korea most Korean people marry in western style, a white dress. Afterwards, many visitors told us they were impressed and want a Korean wedding as well.
The night before I slept pretty good, just by not thinking about the ceremony too much. I woke up early due to realization and saw it was cloudy outside. I got op and then had a good breakfast with my sister, my parents and aunt and uncle. Then I left earlier to go to the ceremony place. While I was in my taxi, the sky cleared up and when I walked up the stairs to the wedding area the sun broke through.
Then I had to sit in the ‘makeup room’,, get my hair done and I put on our custom made tradional Korean clothes for the occasion. It was then when I realized, I was able to go to the bathroom easily until the ceremony was finished so I stopped drinking water.
Later I saw my mom enter with her Korean clothes and suddenly I realized the wedding as really going to happen soon. Later I saw my family and friends also come up the stairs, from China, Korea and Netherlands. Needles to say, my wife had a lot of visitors from Korea, together there were about 500 visitors counted at the reception desk. Some even found us without an invitation, maybe because of a newspaper article written by the father of my wife about a Dutch wedding his Korean daugher.
Everything seemed to be working out great, I saw smiles on people’s faces, and the weather also turned up for the best. For the ceremony, you can’t refer to my wife’s blog sunacho.com for detailed description of the different rituals of the wedding and different cultural customs. It always very quick for me, in Korea the bride is carried inside the wedding area by four men, usually these are friends of the groom, so I asked my colleagues and friends to join in.
On the ceremony itself it turns out that my friends also had to carry me, and I weight a little more then the bride, being carried inside by my friends, it felt like being in a movie with the traditional area, music and hundreds of people looking at us.
Then the carriers had to walk back to get the bride, this was quite interesting, my dad had to pay the hesitant carriers (who take good care of the bride!) to take them further and further inside the wedding area, which is kind of a play, it made the audience laugh.
Finally, the real wedding ceremony started and there was a lot of bowing involved to both parents and each other, then part of the ceremony is to drink something. I was looking forward to this because I became very thirsty in the 22°C sun. I expected it to be Korean vodka but thankfully it was thirst settling Sprite.
Then one speaker announced our wedding to the spirits, burned his writings afterwards, and then it was time for my friends to release a live chicken in the audience. This was very interesting! It’s a tradition that the person in the audience who catches the chicken can keep it, now this is my type of wedding. I would never have thought of this when I was guessing about my wedding when I was younger.
Read more about the wedding from Marc’s blog post about the day, check his Flickr page, or the news article at DT News in Korean.
In the end there was a picture session – after all this is Korea – and then people dugg in to their food. Later we went to the wedding party. Let’s just say I won’t put up many pictures from that night, but we ended up dancing on the streets…
Gotta say, a Dutch public tv documentary about two actresses attending/nominated at an ‘emmy’-like award show in Seoul didn’t appeal to me at first. 
Chinese seem to bring a birthday cake on own initiative (a friendly reminder?). Good time to celebrate the first (of many) birthday in a startup! Shanghainese bring cake to the office and eat noodles as a sign for longevity, of-course followed with restaurant and then clubbing or KTV.
Therefore, I want to create a habit of doing this multitasking behind computer. I got myself an excellent 
No one leaves unsatisfied with YY5 Asahi draft beers and YY88 gets you a ticket to unlimited beef piled in mountainous form. Besides the food, you eat in private in your personal room (tatami) The taste and the service was so good that we kept on coming back.
At the teahouse drinking tea and relaxing in the sun.