Wedding Dress Shopping

On Saturday we headed to Seoul's Gangnam district (made famous by PSY) to meet our wedding planner and go shopping for the wedding dress Jihyeon will wear to the photo shoot next month and also pick out a tux for me. The easiest way to get to the Gangnam district from Daejeon is to catch a bus from the rather large terminal complex in Daejeon.

The English signage at the bus station isn't fantastic. The blue ticket windows below are for people who have pre-ordered tickets online. The green windows are where you go to buy your ticket. To pick up a pre-ordered ticket you need to hand over the credit card used to purchase the tickets as identification.

My ticket departing at 7:30am. There is no arrival time on the ticket, but it takes about 2 hours (depending on traffic).

The bus was a first class limousine bus. Really wide leather seats with lots of leg room. There are only 3 seats across the bus and Jihyeon was thoughtful enough to book me one of the single seats so I didn't have to sit next to anyone. Thanks~~.

In Seoul I met up with Jihyeon at the bus terminal. Word of warning. The bus terminal in Gangnam is HUGE. There are around 100 bus platforms in total. If you are meeting someone there, make sure you have their phone number so you can find them. We then jumped on the subway and headed to the wedding dress shop.

This is a really nice feature on the subway in Seoul. You can see at the bottom of the screen it shows you where the next train is.

We then met up with our wedding planner...

And walked around the corner to the wedding dress shop. 

Before going in, shoes must come off and slippers must go on. Men's slippers on the left, woman's slippers on the right.

This was the first tux I tried on with long coat tails. I didn't really like it.

This was the second tux I tried on. I liked it a little better. I felt like James Bond.

This was the third tux and the one we ended up choosing.

This is the 5th tux. The 4th tux was ugly so no photo was taken. They liked me so said they would throw this jacket in for free to use at our photo shoot next month.

Next up was choosing a wedding dress.

First cab off the rank was this dress. I thought she looked good, but apparently it is an old style dress. 

Second dress was this one. It looks exactly the same as the first to me.

3 dresses in, and she found the one she wants.

Another dress

And another

And the last one...

I also made this animated gif.

After wedding dress shopping we grabbed some lunch with Jihyeon's sister. 

The chopsticks and spoons were hidden in a draw under the table. This is a common trick in Korea to save space on the table. 

After lunch we went to a suit shop to get a suit tailored for me. 

I had no idea what I wanted and it is impossible to imagine what the finished thing will look like from a small square of cloth. Lucky for me I had two fashion conscious Korean women with me.

Time to get measured up. 

Once the suit was sorted, we caught a bus to Suwon which is where Jihyeon's sister lives and went shoe shopping. 

Once the shoes were sorted we went out to dinner and had BBQ pork ribs. 

There are big pieces of meat hanging off the bones, so the idea is that you use scissors to cut up the meat into smaller pieces and then eat it Samgyeopsal style wrapped up in some lettuce.

After dinner we went to a pub and ordered a rather interesting thing to share. It was called Hwachae and is basically like a fruit punch (except you don't drink it, you eat it like soup). The one we ordered had some milk in it which is what made it white, but you couldn't taste the milk at all. 

There is a big communal bowl in the middle, and then you serve up what you want into your own bowl and eat it like you would soup. 

On the way home we stopped off at a dinosaur park and rode the triceratops. That's Jihyeon's sisters boyfriend behind me. 

Bed time...zzzzzzzzzzzz