The Seoul Trip

The trip to Seoul to get married was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be. We woke up early on Sunday morning at the Hyundai Hotel to go have the wonderful breakfast buffet. It was delicious, and pretty western. Only a few of the things were the usual Korean way of having the right items, but prepared the wrong way. Otherwise, everything was delicious. After breakfast, Cody and I went for a swim in the hotel pool, which was really nice, and then we visited the hotel gift shop, which had various Korean crafts and pottery and such. We were very happy to find a tea set that we liked, that had actually been made in Korea. Up until then, every tea set that we found that we liked had been made in China, and we wanted a Korean set, so we were very happy to finally find a Korean set that we liked.

At 11 we left the hotel to go get ready to go to Seoul. We gathered our things and left on the 1:10 train, because we wanted to get everything done quickly so that we wouldn’t have to spend too much money there. We got into Seoul around 5:00 but didn’t make it into Itaewon until about 6 because we got on the wrong subway train on accident. We were still lucky that both What the Book and the Foreigner’s Market were still open until 8 or so on a Sunday night, because we were able to get our errands there out of the way, which was nice. After we dropped our stuff off at our hotel and finished purchasing what we needed, we headed to a Mexican restaurant owned by a foreigner and had some delicious chicken nachos and a chorizo burrito. It was so nice eating Mexican food, and I look forward to having a variety of foods when we return home in a month.
After eating, we returned to our hotel room with some snacks to plan out the next day and we went to bed fairly early because we wanted to get an early start.

The next morning we got up at 7:30 so that we could shower and be at the US Embassy by 9:00 when they open. We got there really quickly, not realizing how close it was by Subway and just sat around relaxing and watching all the US and Korean ROK soldiers patrolling around the embassy. We also walked around the block a little bit, and realized that the embassy is right next to Insadong, the Korean traditional craft street (a very touristy area, but you can get a lot of cool stuff there), as well as right next to the big palace we had visited in the winter. We decided that after we finished getting the marriage paperwork filed, we would go visit the National museum that is on the palace grounds and we hadn’t been able to visit before.

Finally, the embassy opened at 9, and we were allowed to enter. First, we had to enter a smaller building where everything had to be scanned by security and we had to go through metal detectors. We had to leave behind all of our electronics (in case any of them were explosives or something that might compromise the security of the embassy I think, which is smart considering North Korea is less that a half hour drive or so from the embassy), so unfortunately we couldn’t take pictures of the process.

Anyway, we finally made it in to the embassy and had to get let through two heavy bullet-proof doors into an office that looked a lot like a DMV, but maybe less crowded. We already had all of our paperwork filled out, so we took a number and were helped pretty quickly. Unfortunately we forgot to fill in our country next to our passport numbers, so he had to step aside and fill that out on five sets of paperwork (we had to have two affidavit forms filled out and three marriage certificates filled out and ready, which caused a lot of hand cramping, lol), but luckily they didn’t make us take another number.

The rest was pretty easy. They took our paperwork and had us pay 110,000 (about $90) and then we waited for our interview. If one of us hadn’t been American, then the interview would have been more in depth so that they could make sure we didn’t just want to get married to get a visa, but since we are both Americans, they just asked us if we were currently married to anyone else. We then had to leave the embassy and take our paperwork two blocks away to the Korean Ward Office to legally get married in Korea.

We were a bit upset because we were there on a Monday, because we found out that if we had been there on a Tuesday or Thursday, then we would have been able to get free Korean wedding pictures in Hanbok done. Oh well. We paid another 10,000 (about $8) for the processing fee and then we were official married in Korea. We then had to take our stamped paperwork back to the Embassy, go through security again (they kept our electronics since they knew we were coming back, so it was easier) and file the finished paperwork with the Embassy so then we were officially married in America. It was all pretty easy and only took about an hour to do.
After we finished getting married legally (yay), we headed to a nearby coffee show to get something to eat and relax for a bit and then we headed over to the palace to check out the free national museum. It was pretty interesting, and I usually get bored at museums really fast. The displays were pretty good and interesting for the most part, and they actually allowed pictures as long as you kept the flask off. It was a big difference from the Mokpo Natural History museum, which was pretty bad. It’s something you really can’t even explain how bad it is, the stuffed animals on display were laughable, and they actually had store-bought souvenirs on display. The National Museum in Seoul was the total opposite.

We finished with the museum around 12:30 and headed through the Insadong Art Street toward the subway to get to the train station. On the way there, we ran into Barry and Lisa, who had been celebrating their wedding anniversary in Seoul and chatted awhile. We then headed to the train station, unfortunately missing the 1:00 train, but that was ok because we were able to hang out at the train station and we found out that there are a bunch of restaurants in the station that we didn’t know existed, and we had some really good bokumbap at one of the restaurants we found.

We finally headed out on the train to come back to Mokpo and we spent the next couple of days just hanging around the apartment resting and catching up on things we had been putting off.