Typical Modern Korean Wedding

A few months ago, you may remember Riley and I went to a Traditional Korean wedding of one of our friends.  That is not the normal way people get married here.  According to a friend, weddings only go the traditional way if a foreigner is involved (and our friend who was married the traditional way was Chinese, so it fits).  We had the opportunity last weekend to go to a regular Korean wedding of our landlady's daughter.  Unfortunally my camera batteries died at the beginning of the ceremony, but I will describe it as best I can.
It takes place at a wedding hall.  These are large buildings with multiple rooms set up for weddings.  The one we went to (the VIP Wedding Hall http://www.vip-wedding.co.kr/) had 3 halls.  Our friend was married in the Deluxe Hall.  It was a nice room with a raised aisle town the center lines with real trees (not alive, but decorated with flowers), and it had an alter at the front. 
The first thing you do at the wedding was get your meal ticket.  You go to this counter where you give your gift to trade for a meal ticket.  More about the meal later.  There was no line and people were pushing their way to the counter to get their tickets as well as greet the family that was standing next to the counter.  I should also tell you about the gifts.  You give only money, nothing else.  They have special envelopes that you put the money in.  These envelopes are white with Chinese writing on them that I believe means "Congratulations." 
After getting the ticket, everyone crams into the wedding hall.  I say crams because we had to stand in the back against the wall.  Its lucky we are so tall.  We got to say hi to our friend as she got into place at the end of the aisle, since that basically where we were standing.  I should also mention that the room had a large entrance that had no door, and a side entrance that also had no door.  Throughout the ceremony people walked in and out of this place.  A large group of adjumas stayed about 10 minutes, then left to go eat.  Later, a large group of girls showed up and waved to the bride.  I'm glad we are tall and could see over the moving people. 
Meanwhile the ceremony was taking place.  First, the mothers (dressed in the traditional dress of Korea, Hanbok) walked down the aisle and bowed to the audience with much applause.  Then the groom walked to the front (with applause) and waited.  The bride was walked to the front by her father and given to the groom (all with much applause).  The bride and groom bowed to each other, also to much applause.  Pretty much everything that happened was applauded.  There was a guy behind the podium at the front who narrated everything and performed the ceremony.  They had to wait while the sister of the bride ran around trying to figure out where they had put the rings (eventually found in someone's pocketbook).  That wasn't part of the tradition, but it was memorable.
After the guy behind the podium finished talking, the bride and groom went to each set of parents and bowed.  The groom went all the way to the ground, but the bride just went as low as her dress would allow.
Then it was time to cut the cake.  They rolled a cake over (only the top tier was real cake).  Then the bride and groom blew the candles out.  Yes, there were two candles on top of the cake.  Then they got out this large knife/sword and cut the cake.  Then the cake was rolled back to the corner.  No one got to eat the cake.
After that came the singing.  I believe they were friends of the bride and groom.  First, a girl sang a couple songs that sounded like they were from musicals (she even wore a hat and fake mustache for one), and a guy sang a romantic song in which other guys continuously brought the bride roses.
I would like to mention that everything was taken care of by employees of the wedding hall.  Attendants ran around and fixed the bride's train.  A photographer and videographer were front and center all the time.  The only people who participated in the wedding were the bride and groom, their parents, and the singers.  The room was rented for only one hour, and it came already decorated.  Someone was married the hour before, and another wedding was schedule for the hour after.
After the wedding, everyone headed to the buffet.  It was on the top floor.  We turned in out ticket and went into a dining room with an all you can eat buffet.  The buffet served two dining rooms, and I think there were still people from the wedding before our eating.   The food was excellent!  Mostly Korean, but there was some spaghetti on one side.
And that is a typical Korean wedding.  No bouquet toss, no dancing, and no stressing about the reception.

Riley's Research

Hello All!

This is Riley the bad husband who doesn't help his wife with their blog.  I want to address the question that I get asked many times: "So Riley what do you do?" 

Well... I'm glad you asked.  I am a master's student in nuclear engineering at a university in Korea.  For my research project, I am researching how to split nuclear fuel into separate peices that are easier to deal with than nuclear fuel as a whole.

Connecticut Yankee dry storage from 38 years of operation.  If you look closely there are people walking around the containers which provide adequate shielding from the radiation. Website

Nuclear fuel can be though of as having 3 parts:

Natural Uranium 
About 96% of fuel
Extremely low radioactivity
Very very long half life (4 billion years)
Naturally occurring

Plutonium+Minor Actinides
About 1% of fuel
Medium radioactivity
Long Half Life (100,000 years-ish)

Fission Products
About 3 % of fuel  
High radioactivity
Short Half Life (30 years-ish)
This is why nuclear fuel is super dangerous


So if we can divide the fuel into these sections we can do some cool things:

Recycle the uranium, or return it to the environment in its original inert form.
Burn the plutonium and minor actinides in the reactor of your choice
Dispose of the fission products in a small short term facility that is easy to build (think size of school lunch room)

The US already has a technology called PUREX to recycle nuclear fuel, but it is a pain to use, and we choose not to use it for geo-political reasons.  Japan just built a PUREX type plant to do it and it cost $20 billion and the cost is still going up. 


For various geo-political reasons,  South Korea cannot use PUREX.  So if they want to chop up their fuel into the three components, they need another way.  So they are trying to use a method that the Americans are not very serious about that involves melting salt.

Because no large scale facilities have ever operated that use this technology, the system still needs optimized for good operation.  And because we can't just build one to play around with, we need to make computer models to simulate what will happen.  However, the computer models need to be checked, to make sure that they are correct, and that is what I do. 

Over the past few years I have made 2 computer models of my own, and have helped the folks in the US use one of those models.  For my masters research work, I am building a pretend machine to process magnesium (instead of uranium) to test my models.  I think we will begin tests some time in the next two months.  Wish me luck.

Birthday Pie

As some of you may know, Riley's birthday was yesterday.  He requested pumpkin pie.  I thought I would describe the challenges it takes here to make one.  Of course, you can always go to the Costco and buy one.  Costco here has the largest amount of western food you can find in Korea (except for the area in Seoul near the army base).  However, it is halfway across town, I don't have a card, and its always packed with people.  So, I would need to make a pumpkin pie from scratch.
Pumpkins here are little and green.  Large orange ones are not common and very expensive.  They are the cooking type of pumpkin too, I have yet to see a carving pumpkin here.  Canned pumpkin is also elusive, and everything in cans here is much more expensive than the US (ex. heinz tomato sauce is $3).  So, I use the little green pumpkins.
Nutmeg, cloves, and all spice are either really expensive or just not here.  In America I usually make the recipe on the canned pumpkin label.  It involves using evaporated milk.  You can find evaporated milk here if you go to really big grocery stores or an international store.  Its also expensive, so I used a different recipe.
The rest of the ingredients are pretty easy to get (milk, eggs, cinnamon).  The recipe I used makes it fluffy with beaten egg whites, which is always interesting.
The last challenge was the crust.  You can't buy ready made crust here.  I've always avoided making it in the past because its annoying, but I found a recipe using oil that isn't too bad.
So, making a pumpkin pie in Korea is challenging and takes a long time, but the end is worth it.  Plus, I can now make a pumpkin pie from scratch!

We finally went to Seoul!

Last Saturday we went to Seoul as tourists.  Some people who visit South Korea never even leave Seoul, but we had been here over a year and have barely seen anything of the world's second biggest metropolitan area (Wikipedia).  It worked out really well.  I looked online and the top things to do in Seoul were things like "try the food" and "look at traditional dress."  All that we had left to do was visit historic palaces and visit our friend Sunny who had recently moved to Seoul for school (actually, this was more of a visit Sunny first and see historic stuff on the side). 
We went to the famous palace in Seoul, Gyeongbok Palace.  This was the last palace the king and queen of Korea ever lived in.

See all the pretty umbrellas?  It was pouring rain.  This turned out to be good, there were less people to wait behind to see the thrones.  We also got some free middle school tour guides to tell us about the palace.

The two girls on the ends were our tour guides, and the girl in the middle is our friend Sunny.

It was a really neat place.  We learned that the queen wasn't allowed to leave the inner palace, and there was a stream that commoners weren't allowed past into the outer palace.  They also had palace guards like they do at Buckingham palace, except their facial hair was painted on.

We then went to a historical area that had a lot of old restored buildings.  It was a nice place, full of winding roads and nice buildings.  They were all privately owned, we though it would be a nice place to live.

So, Seoul was a really nice place to visit.  They have 5 palaces in Seoul and we only got to see one.  We may have to go back and visit Sunny again.

Korean Roadkill

You can tell a lot about an area by what kind of roadkill it has.  Riley and I have been exploring the country roads around Daejeon lately on our bicycles.  In the city I have only seen a few mice and bird roadkill (the tiny dogs here seem well behaved and don't run out into the street much), but in the country I was shocked by the clean roads.  There were no funny smells along the way.  In the first trip, for the first part the biggest roadkills I saw were praying mantises.  After a while I finally saw a small snake squished in the road, but there wasn't anything big at all.  They don't have possums or armadillo-type animals, so that means less roadkill.  Their larger mammals (deer and racoon dogs) aren't very abundant, so I suppose they don't get hit much. 
On this latest trip I saw another small snake squished (it was really pretty, I think it is called a flower snake), but I also saw the most exciting roadkill yet!  I saw a very flat weasel!  I didn't even know they had weasels in Korea! 
Since I have seen little roadkill in Korea, I don't think there is abundant wildlife, but at least there are snakes and weasels!

Korean Red Pine

The Korean Red Pine is Korea's favorite tree.  If you see Asian pictures with the mountains and twisted pine trees, those are usually red pine.  I picked up a book about them recently and discovered something about the Korean ideal of forests that was completely different that what I had ever experienced in America.  For those of you who are not familiar with forestry, I will start at the basics.  The trees that make up a forest can tell you how long the forest has been there.  Fast growing species indicate a young forest, while slow growing species mean its been there a long time.  This is why most of the wood we use is pine, pine grows very quickly. 
I bring this up because in Korea, the red pine forests started appearing around areas of agriculture and towns.   The forests were logged for buildings and then continuously picked over for wood and cleared for farmland.  Pines were the trees that came back quickly and could be maintained to provide constant wood supply.  They became the symbol for civilization in Korea.
Since Korea stopped burning wood so much, the forests are turning back into the slow growing tree species and the red pine forests are starting to disappear.
The most interesting part of this story was the final chapter of the book I read.  It was all about how if we don't do something soon, all the red pine forests will disappear.  The Korean red pine forest is the ideal forest for Korea.  I was always taught that this natural progression to a climax forest dominated by hardwoods was inevitable (without regular fire anyway), and natural.  Instead of wanting to go back to the pre-people era of Korea, they want to go back to the wood-burning era of Korea.  The idea of how forested Korea should look is different than I am used to.  Its another interesting culture difference.

After 1 year in Korea

There were a few aspects of American life I have been away from so long that they surprised me on my recent trip back. 
The first thing is that everything is bigger.  Yards, houses, stores, cars, trees, dogs, and people are all bigger. 
The second thing is that everything is colder.  This doesn't refer to the outside temperature (which was amazing) but to the air conditioned areas.  For instance, the airport in Korea is not really air conditioned that much, it feels like it does outside.  Restaurants are kept a little cooler, but you have to be lucky to sit where the ac blows.  I almost froze at a Taco Bell in America.
The third thing it that all the food tastes like butter.  This is a little bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.  Butter isn't super common in Korea, and real butter is expensive ($8 for 2 cups).  When I was exposed to delicious casseroles and biscuits, the butter taste was almost overwhelming (but also very tasty). 
The last thing I really noticed was the diversity of people.  There are a lot of foreigners here in Korea, but the great majority is still Korean.  I have missed seeing lots of different shapes and colors of faces around me, and it was nice to blend in for a little while.

Being back in Korea is pretty normal, except it smells different than America.  Even the soap smells different here.  Also, the lovely smell of kimchi greeted me at the airport (I'm not kidding, I do like the smell of kimchi).