Getting Married in Korea Pt.1 (getting started)

With the wedding coming up in just 2 weeks, I thought I'd share some of the process. 

Most Koreans plan their weddings anywhere from 4 months to a year in advance, but more in the 5 month range.  This sounds crazy to most western brides who plan for 1+ years.  The difference is that most weddings here are wedding hall machines.  You pick your hall and literally everything is included in your package.  No hunting down separate vendors of any kind.

These kinds of weddings are also huge, impersonal, and short..I'm talking in and out in less than 2 hours.  The couple will invite upwards of 300 guests, every person they or their parents have ever known.  The typical wedding gift is cash, which is given in return for a meal ticket.  So, in the end, the couple usually makes all the money spent on food back in gifts.

We knew this is not the kind of wedding we wanted from the start.  The options for a small wedding are basically: find an outdoor public space that can be rented, house wedding venue, restaurant, or a pension (a place in the semi-countryside with a bunch of cabin style houses).

Originally, I thought we would do a pension wedding where everyone would spend the weekend and we'd have a big party all night long.  I was obsessed with a place i found on Instagram called Herb Castle in Gyeongju, close to husband to be's hometown.  It was going to be about 7 million won to have the wedding there, not including real flowers, a dress or studio photos.  After visiting, we realized the logistics of getting everyone there and using outside vendors was more hassle than it was worth.

so, we started searching for something in Seoul.  We attended a wedding fair and talked to a planner who tried to get us to pay for a hair, dress, makeup package on the spot.  We didn't even have a date set yet.  That didn't end up being for us, but we learned a lot more about what we needed.  We started calling around to some of the house wedding venues I had found, but even though they advertise a "small wedding," they still mostly wanted a minimum of 200 guests.  We were hoping for 70-80.

These are some of the places I liked with the outdoor, garden feel.

La Vie Douce
Namsan Art Wedding Hall
Dugahun
Han's Gallery
Min's Club -my friend got married here last year!
Samcheonggak
  

I found another wedding planner, Sunny Plan on Instagram and we set up a meeting with them.  They recommended one of the restaurants I had had my eye on in photos and we went from there.