Tales from a Korean Wedding

Or: How to Get Married in 3 Hours and Feed 200 Strangers at Once

Seoul is a city built on contradictions and careful choreography.

It’s a place where forty-storey glass towers cast shadows on two-storey barbecue joints. Where tree-lined alleyways snake between apartment blocks like the city is still trying to remember its village roots. One moment you’re strolling past hanok houses and hidden cafés; the next, you’re dodging traffic on a six-lane arterial highway flanked by digital billboards the size of baseball fields. It’s asymmetry with purpose — like someone built SimCity using intuition and a deadline.

Half of Korea lives here, and it shows with how bad the traffic is at midnight.

I arrived in this giant mosaic of a city not just as a tourist, but as a wedding guest. Nura and Jack — two people who could’ve easily eloped or married on a cliff in Santorini — decided instead to have their wedding in Nura’s hometown of Ansan, about an hour outside Seoul. And like everything else in Korea, it was beautiful, fast, and slightly surreal.

The Ceremony: Like a Gameshow, but Tender

At 9:00 a.m., a shuttle bus picked us up from Exit 3 of Hongik University Station — which, like most subway exits in Seoul, is less an “exit” than it is a portal into an entirely different commercial district. For reasons that will become clear later, the bus was late because it had gone to the wrong part of the road.

The venue — Villa de GD — sounds like a nightclub but looks like Versailles with a soft-focus filter. We arrived at 10:15. The ceremony started at 11:00. By 12:00, Jack and Nura were married.

It was, quite honestly, like watching a beautiful gameshow. You walk in to unallocated seating where the venue is dressed as an exquisite dining experience, except you are not there to eat, you are there to admire. You don’t ask questions; you just trust the system. There’s a master of ceremonies (suit, earpiece, clipboard), a singer (dramatic, heartfelt, possibly trained in musical theatre), and a groom who is expected to bow a bunch of times.

The whole thing is over in about forty-five minutes.

Before we could even lean in for a “Wasn’t that lovely?” the doors were opened and we were gently but unmistakably encouraged to leave — so the next wedding party could move in, reset, and repeat. At Villa de GD, weddings are not a one-day affair. They are a rotation.

The Buffet: The Real Reason People Come

Downstairs, the post-wedding banquet awaited, and so did everyone else getting married in Villa de GD that day.

Long tables groaned under the weight of every Korean delicacy imaginable: bulgogi, sashimi, japchae, fried chicken, spicy crab, cold noodles, hot stone bowls, mystery jellies. There was even a steak station with chefs grilling to order. The only thing missing was formal seating. You sat where you could — between other guests, between other weddings.

But it didn’t matter. The whole space was alive with motion: relatives clinking soju, toddlers darting under tables, old friends waving across buffet trays like stockbrokers at a crab auction. Jack and Nura floated through it all like benevolent hosts at a very well-fed utopia.

Notes from the City

Outside the wedding bubble, Seoul kept pulsing.

It’s a place that invites comparison but resists conclusion. You can find craft coffee served by tattooed baristas in one alley, and a shrine to a 15th-century king in the next. Hotel staff speak English like seasoned diplomats; convenience store clerks less so — though everyone is polite to a fault.

That said, bring cash. Or at least a physical card. Many places don’t take tap-to-pay (apple pay), and waving your iPhone at a card machine will often earn you a look somewhere between sympathy and confusion.

After the Vows, a BBQ

The next night, we reconvened in Hongdae — Seoul’s youth-and-music district — for a post-wedding dinner at Kimchunbae Grove, a Korean BBQ restaurant with just enough industrial wood to feel casual, but curated. No seating chart. No ceremony. Just meat, beer, and laughter.

Here, Jack and Nura were no longer bride and groom — they were just two people surrounded by their people. They grilled mushrooms for vegetarians, poured makgeolli for new friends, swapped stories, and finally, finally had a moment to breathe.