Another "Only in Korea" moment.

(HT to Scribblings of the Metropolitician)

The fun begins at 0:43, but the video's short enough you might as well watch the piped-in music, the chit-chatting, and the photographer up in everyone's business.



You know, there's something extremely ridiculous about Korean TV commercials for wedding halls and advertisements for white wedding gowns. Women fawning over something they don't understand, simply because they saw it in a movie or on TV, awash in the glow of their own smug self-satisfaction, and looking about as natural as a pug on Halloween (yes, that sentence is a texbook case of structural ambiguity). About the same degree of ridiculousness associated with Korean "pizza" or other poorly-done imports. Well, nowadays the trend for Western-ish trappings at weddings is so entrenched that people are just keeping up with the Kims. The Western-ish ceremony is just for show, anyway, not only a display of wealth but also an opportunity to reenact the stereotypes associated with Westerners and their exotic rituals (ceremony, photographs, and sex). The white gown is just part of an elaborate costume party marketed as the height of sophistication. Just goes to show that you can't buy class, as if those familiar with Korea's nouveau-riche needed another reminder.

Even the white-trashiest of my relatives never had dancing girls perform at the ceremony. Perhaps that's where things went wrong.

So the usual suspects don't attack me for blindly hating Korea, I might as well add that the wedding business back home is a nightmare, too, an opportunity for women to spend lots of money on themselves before getting divorced in 28 months. Because they don't invite me I've been in Korea for a little while, I haven't been to a wedding back home in about six or seven years, and it's a wonder that anyone can even take the ceremony seriously anymore. With the popularity of teenage pregnancy, adultery, and divorce, it's obvious few care about the institution of marriage anymore, but at least there's some reverence for the ceremony, and I know that if my great-aunt Su-bin ever pulled shit like that in the video, she'd get beat worse than a truant student.