My Birthday

My Birthday

I will start by writing that I thoroughly enjoyed celebrating my birthday three times in Korea!
Friday
On Friday, I went to school and everyone at school thought my birthday was on Saturday (it really was the following wednesday but we were celebrating saturday and invited to staff so we just let them think the birthday was saturday). Anyway, so my Korean Teaching partner, Michelle, had all the students draw me a picture in secret and then laminated them all as a keepsake for me! How Special! And then with my afternoon elementary students I brought in suckers and cakey cookies to celebrate with each class. They liked that!
Then that night we left the school and headed to GS25 (the convenience store/plastic chairs to have some drinks)... well Ansan (my city) was having a food fair and the pedestrian streets were littered with little white tents and different foods and carnival games (dart balloons, throw the baseball at the wooden blocks, shooting games).
So we toured around a bit and then ended up in front of GS 25 because conveniently a stage was set up right there with all of these chairs for some sort of concert. As we are standing there, taking it all in, a Korean man approaches us and asks us to come into a restaurant for some soju and to meet his band!! ASSAH (Korean for hooray!) so not wanting to pass up an opportunity that will for sure bring laughs we go in and have some soju shots with the band members whose names included; Rocky......................... After this we continued our wandering and ran into men/women dressed as soju bottles! Think of a large costume Absolute bottle walking around with a face and posing for pictures (ohh Korea korea). The night pretty much continued like this until after dark.... at which point we shot off fireworks in the middle of the street (the prize we won from the carnival games). Then we met up with some more foreigners who were heading to “BEER PLUS” We got in there and there was literally 50 foreigners there!!! We had 6 tables pushed together and a massive row of people. Word got out that it was my birthday and the owner brought out a hat and a cake and everyone sang.... and because 50 people were in attendance it turns out that it was two other guys birthdays too... so not wanting to be selfish I made them wear the hat and we all blew out the cake together!!!! It was GRRRRREAT!!!

Saturday
Then Saturday was the big night out in Seoul. We all didn’t do a whole lot in the day and then left at about 4p.m. for Seoul. My friend I met a couple of weeks ago came to celebrate, then the sweetest Korean girl I had just met on Friday came out with us, and then it was the regulars, Camille, Bridgett, Roberta, and Will. We all took the subway to the University party district. Started the night out at a lounge, then ate at a spicy chicken Korean BBQ type of place. Then as I was standing on the street with Darin these three Korean University aged boys come up to us with video cameras. They ask if we could do this test for them for a school project. Of course, we don’t want to turn something down in the name of “education” so we say yes. They get us each to suck on a piece of litmus paper and then make out for the camera!!! ha ha ha I have since seen the video of this after (the one Camille taped) and one of the Korean boys is saying “good.. “G” “O” “D”... good” haha. We then had to suck on the litmus paper again to see if it changed colour. Of course it never, so we took a swig of orange juice and then the litmus paper changed for the test. Who knows what it really was all for but it was pretty pretty funny. We then continued merrily wandering around. And ran into our same costume soju bottle friends that we saw in Ansan the night before... like what are the chances! In a city of 7 million! From there we met up with a couple more army boys (that Bridgett/Camille knew from months back) and all headed to the “ice bar.” This place was so COOOOL (pun intended). It was -5 degrees Celsius and they gave us silver coats to wear with a fur trim. The walls had ice on them, the bar was made of ice (even the stools), the cups we drank out of were ice, and there were some pretty cool statues of ice. Roberta’s friend Anne Marie and her Korean boyfriend and friend also met us there. At one point, all lights went out and they gave us sparklers and played a birthday song for me... it was all AMAZING!!! From there we went to a club danced around and then caught a taxi home to Ansan which only cost about $50.00 split between us five so well worth it!!! The birthday was all and all one for the books!