::A Geek in Korea::

One of my wife’s elementary school friends invited us to his wedding this weekend. My wife had prepared a gift, a giant hand made Korean paper lamp to give as a gift. She was going to give it to him instead of cash, the traditional Korean wedding present. The only problem with a large wedding gift is that you need a container to package it in, and we don’t own a car. If only we owned a car, this entire nightmare could have been avoided….but I digress.

Last night, my wife had to construct her own Frankenstein like box to hold her gift, and then wrapped it. Of course due to the odd dimensions, she had to cut and fold each piece of wrapping paper like origami to have THAT fit. She was up late preparing, and we had to leave early in the morning to catch the bus to go to the wedding.

The wedding was in Cheonan, which is a popular place to have a wedding. It basically splits the difference between Daejeon and Seoul and has lots of wedding halls. This is the second wedding I’ve been to at a wedding hall that has arranged a bus for the people in Daejeon to ride up to Cheonan. If we had a car, we wouldn’t have had to ride the bus, but, sadly, we were dependant on the transportation provided.

We arrived in time to catch the private bus, and were forced to sit in the second to last row. We set my wife’s large gift in the aisle, since there was no where else to put it. The elderly people behind us would be leaping from their seat every few minutes to greet someone or to get tissues, but a meter tall gift didn’t stop them. They’d jump over it, or kick it out of the way. It was clearly a gift for the wedding couple, but that wouldn’t stop anyone.

The ride up to the wedding hall was a bit dull. They served pork with kimchi, which seems like a bad dish to pick when riding on a bumpy bus full of people wearing expensive hanboks and suits, but this is the second wedding that’s done this. The soju started flowing on the bus promptly at 10:20 AM. I didn’t partake in drinking strong alcohol in the middle of the morning because at that time I still had my dignity. If only I had finished off a bottle of booze before the nightmare began, perhaps the rest of the day wouldn’t have been that bad.

We arrived at the wedding hall to find we knew only a handful of people. The groom hangs out with rough and shady people. He admitted most of his friends were gangsters, or at least LOOKED a lot like gangsters back when he was single. I had met the guy once with a group of his friends. He wasn’t exaggerating. Most of people looked like they had fallen out of the door of a shady nightclub a few hours earlier in the day. Really bad suits, women with miniskirts, and terrible hair will be what is captured in this man’s wedding photos.

We didn’t stick around for the wedding pictures. The wedding was ultra-cheesy. The disco lights were doing a twirling laser show that was fit for a 1960’s era Batman villian. We saw the couple ride a mechanical chariot, spewing dry ice fog to approach the ceremony. When they walked down the aisle they were flanked with sword toting women dressed as flight attendants. There were also bright lights shining in our faces. We had seen enough. We decided to cash in our meal coupon and go to the buffet.

The buffet was not as advertised. It was an assortment of the most inedible Korean foods of questionable safety ever collected in one place. Day old boiled octopus? Raw beef that probably sat out all day? We had some soup, but we stuck mostly to the rice and fruit. It was also not a self-service buffet. We had to sit while they brought us some food. The woman that delivered the food to our table hit me square on the temple with her metal serving tray. She NAILED me in the head as she tried to squeeze behind me and a pillar. The gangster looking dudes looked around at the source of the noise, and I swallowed down my annoyance. She apologized, and we wondered why she didn’t just go around the other side of the table to serve us where there was no pillar. We finished our meal and left.

The problem with the bus going home was that no one set a time to be back on the bus. The groom’s mother was in charge of the bus, as she was the one handing out the alcohol earlier, but she was occupied with the post-wedding hall ceremonies. We had to wait for the entire wedding party to leave by car before she left the wedding hall. The ceremony was finished in twenty minutes, everyone else had finished eating in less than an hour, and people were standing around for another thirty minutes before she got on the bus.

We waited around for another twenty minutes for no good reason. While we were waiting for people on the bus, the women on the bus behind us stole our seat and then began gambling. They were playing GoStop on the bus! They would run around grabbing change from their purses and accused each other of cheating between rounds. It was fairly annoying, but my wife said we couldn’t really do anything since they couldn’t play anywhere else on the bus. She said that as long as they gave our seat back when the bus started, it wasn’t worth speaking up about.

Finally, an hour and a half after all reasonable people would have gotten onto the bus, we departed. We were treated to subjected to some “Bongjak music”, which sounds like polka music with a more annoying bass line. The first, and ONLY song played was a twenty minute song played so loud that your chest rumbled in pain from the noise.

About thirty minutes into the trip, TWO FULL HOURS after the ceremony, someone called the groom’s mother wondering where the bus was. THEY HAD JUST LEFT THE WEDDING HALL! Any reasonable person would have said, “Catch another bus, this one is too far away for us to turn around.” NO.

Instead, this woman said, “My uncle has a car. He’ll drive you to the bus. We’ll park on the side of the road and WAIT FOR YOU.”

The bus pulled over to WAIT for the person that was IN a car to arrive and get ON the bus that they had missed by TWO hours because they hadn’t thought to tell ANYONE that they were going to be on the return trip. They were traveling in a group of people heading back to Seoul, and didn’t want to ride a seperate bus that was HEADING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION, NORTH TO SEOUL. They wanted to be on the bus HEADING AWAY FROM SEOUL, SOUTH, BACK TO DAEJEON, to get BACK TO SEOUL WITH THEIR FRIENDS.

Did we have a vote in this? No. Everyone ELSE on the bus had to wait. They pulled off the highway in the middle of nowhere. There was a gas station a few hundred meters away, but NO OTHER SIGNS OF CIVILIZATION ANYWHERE. We were TRAPPED ON THE BUS!

The people that had been playing GoStop, as well as the people that started drinking at 10:20 AM decided that just because the bus was stopped for the most moronic reason ever wasn’t a reason to stop the party. They took over the radio system and turned up the party music. They started dancing in the aisles and blocked anyone from leaving. We were subjected to thirty minutes of dancing to the exact same loud music that had played earlier.

My wife was crumpled in her chair weak and about to vomit, and I was flabbergasted. I had NEVER met a ruder group of people. We asked if we could leave soon, but they said that the person was on their way and the bus wasn’t moving without them. We said we had an obligation later and were going to miss it. They said we should just get drunk with them and dance. We both had migraine headaches from the music, and the rocking and bass made my wife carsick.

After recording the video, I snapped and basically HAD to get off the bus. I pushed everyone out of our way and got us off the bus of insanity. We decided to try to get a call taxi, at a considerable fee, just so we wouldn’t have to go back on the bus. We walked to the single point of civilization, the gas station, and tried to get a call taxi number. The rest of the party was very unnerved by our willingness to bail on them. “Come back…enjoy the fun….don’t go. Why would you want to leave…we’re having a great time… What’s wrong with them?”

We weren’t the only sober people on the bus, but no one else was attempting to solve this problem. I was closer to punching someone than I had been in a very, very long time. We got the number at the gas station, and were walking back to tell them that we were leaving on our own despite being in the middle of no where when the car, carrying the person that had held up the bus, arrived. The people that got out of the car, who were late to get on the bus, the entire REASON the bus was late, got onto the bus to rejoin their group.

My wife was fighting back her stomach at this point, so the people with the car offered to take us all the way to Daejeon. It turns out someone else was heading that way not affiliated with the wedding. That person wasn’t getting on the bus. The car was giving them a ride all the way into the town.

So just to be clear, the people that made us wait and listen to terrible music, the people that basically kidnapped us, had their own way to get back to town, but had wanted to stop the bus instead so they could ride with their friends. I don’t know WHY that car didn’t take the people who were late for the bus straight to Daejeon, but we had our ride and didn’t ever want to get back on that bus.

The car ride back into town was uneventful. Freed from listening to the terrible music and having people gyrating in our faces, my wife recovered from her carsickness. We basically JUMPED out of the car at the first subway stop we drove pass, and got back home as quickly as we could. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. It wasn’t supposed to become a trial in patience. It was only supposed to be a quick wedding. If only we had a car, all of this could have been avoided.