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Annie, one of the Korean
Teacher at ECC, invited me to go to her wedding. I was more
than happy to go especially since it was a trip out of town that
was all planned out for us from the start. Leona and Rob were
also invited and were also more than happy to join in the
merriment.
Annie planned for her
friend, Kate, to pick us up right in front of the school and
bring us back to Daegu after the wedding, so it was very
simple—no planning on our parts!
I awoke Sunday morning at
6:30am, an extremely early time considering I don’t usually go
to work until about 3:00pm, with the first snow of the year
falling softly outside my window. An adventure! I
thought.
Joining Rob and Leona at
7:30, we met Kate in front of the School as planned. She
stepped out of the car wearing a fur coat and jeans. Yep. To a
wedding. An adventure! I thought, again.
Kate turned out to be an
amazing person and had us laughing even at that early hour
before we even arrived at the West Daegu Home Plus to buy some
tire chains for the road. We took off from West Daegu, merging
on the Number 1 Motorway for Seoul, as Kate told us about her
good—albeit currently uncaffeinated—driving skills. We swerved
to miss the jersey barrier. An adventure! I thought
again just as Leona read my mind, beating me to the comment.
And an adventure is just what it was!
We headed off for the
wedding, which was located in a small village outside of the
Seoul Conurbation. We still don’t know the name of the town,
but I’ll call it Hanam Wedding Chapel Town, as the wedding took
place at a small banquet hall of that name.
Just after leaving Daegu,
the snow started accumulating. We swerved a couple more times.
Then we had to stop and assess the gas tank (which was,
randomly, in the trunk) because Kate smelled gas. I didn’t tell
her that the gas smell was totally my fault. Ha!
We made it to Cheonan, a
large satellite city of Seoul to get on a smaller, rural
highway. I had to make yellow snow, so we pulled over long
enough to get some good pictures of the deep, beautiful snow.
From there, the highway curved out of the city and into and back
out of smaller cities and then towns until we were somewhere
between Cheonan and the winter wonderland of Nowhere, Korea.
After getting lost and lost
again and then finding ourselves lost trying to get ourselves
out of Lost, Korea, we passed through a small town, Asan, which
I promptly decided it was where I wanted to live—if that were an
option. I decided nay on moving there after we assessed
that the foreigner walking down the street was exactly one of
three people in town that spoke English, including all the
Korean citizens of fluent caliber.
Finally arriving at Hanam
Wedding Chapel Town, Korea, with seven minutes to go time, we
rushed into the hall, changing into our wedding clothes even
more quickly than had we jumped up and down three times, danced
one round from Michael Jackson’s Thriller video, and magically
snapped to initiate an instantaneous change of dress.
We posed with the bride.
Then the wedding started. Then the wedding ended, almost as
fast as it took you to read this brief paragraph.
No. The wedding was nice.
The bride, Annie and her husband, Husband, walked down the isle
in a billowing cloud of evaporating dry ice, said their vows as
Who-Wants-To-Be-A-Millionaire-esque, lights rotated
around the couple at the altar. They walked back down the aisle
and were sprayed with foam (you know how it goes: neat,
perfectly ordered chaos that cleans up quickly). A couple poses
for photographers later and we were sitting in the wedding
hall’s dining room enjoying traditional Wedding Noodles and live
squid/octopus. Although it was cut apart, it was still moving
(as would Husband the first time Annie beat him for missing
their anniversary), suctioning first to your chopsticks, then to
your teeth on its final descent into the final abyss of churning
stomach acid.
The ride home was just as
fun as the ride to Hanam Wedding Chapel Town, Korea. Once back
in Asan, after having been playing I Spy, I decided to throw in
a twist. The new game was called: “I-Spy-A-Western-Style-Coffee-Shop-And-Owen-Buys-Everyone-A-Round-Of-Coffee."
Catchy name, don’t you
think?
We searched and searched
through Asan: no shop.
We stoped in Emart: no
shop.
The game turned into: “I-Spy-A-Starbucks-And-Owen-Buys-Everyone-A-Starbucks."
Cheonan. No Starbucks.
We were in our last
throes of hope as we passed through downtown Cheonan, near the
Motorway onramp that would take us, without Starbucks, back to
Daegu. Then I screamed Starbucks (you have to understand, there
was quite a build up, I couldn’t help but scream). I bought a
round of coffees.
Kate took us home,
swerving zero times.
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