My Birthday & catch up

Ok, I've been a bit slack - I haven't posted anything new in ages. I've been dreading writing this post as it is my post 30th birthday post.

So what's been happening? Quite a lot really! Let's start with my birthday.

Thanks to everyone who sent me cards, emails, videos & presents! It really made my birthday special this year! Particularly after my party plans fell through - we were too tired to travel as I'd planned.

The 21st of April was an interesting day, it started with a phone call from my co-teacher asking if I could come in to school (it was a Saturday & I don't work 'em!) I said sure - I'd run into a parent the night before and I thought they would buy me flowers. So we got ready in a rush and headed into school. I didn't have time to dry my hair, a small regret of mine. We walked into my staffroom and I could see 2 boys hiding (badly) behind a desk. I knew what was coming... My co-teacher, Mrs Sohn said "Now" and suddenly twenty boys jumped out from hiding and started singing happy birthday to me. Of course the only reasonable reaction to this is to cry, so I did. A little. I was sat down and Mike took photos & a little video. They gave me a big box of Ferrero Rochere, a bunch of flowers and a sweet potato cake. I was told that the sweet potato cake is a big favourite here - it had so much cream in it, I wondered where was the sweet potato??? Mrs Sohn gave me a letter, as she hadn't known it would be my birthday and I hadn't wanted to talk about it. I shared the cake with a couple of teacher's and my sweet students. It didn't take long before the cake was going on their faces instead of into their mouths!

Afterwards, we headed to Mike's school and witnessed the Wonders of Science day. There were water rocket competitions, model plane competitions, coloured water layering, bridge building, the mystery of the chicken foot (?) - all, as you guessed, a competition! Everything was competitive if it wasn't the fastest then it was the furthest or the best. The only non-competitive thing for the students to do was watch a video and I got the feeling they were doing all they could to get out of that too.
What is the Mystery of the Chicken Foot? Apparently you get a bunch of students to take a cooked chicken foot, remove all the flesh (by hand) then they glue it all back together and give it a manicure with their choice of nail polish! This was the grossest scientific endeavour of the day! So I chose to hang outside watching the water rockets - they were really cool. It was nice that I was sung Happy Birthday three more times by Mike's students and given a hair clip - Super Korean Cutey Pink Bow!

Then we had to rush off as my Principal had decided to shout us lunch. So we met most of my school's teachers at the White House - a white restaurant in Taebaek. We had Galbi Tang - beef soup. It was nice but seeing as it was such a warm day a salad would have been better. It was very sweet of all my teachers to delay their trips home to their families to celebrate my birthday. (Many teachers live apart from their families Monday to Friday or Saturday and only go home on the weekend.)

Then we dashed home to cool down and rest before trying to find the birthday party we'd promised to attend. Which was interesting because, well, we couldn't find it. So I called Mr Kim (he is the father of the birthday baby) and of course he didn't answer. I'm sure he was busy with his guests. Then after walking around for 15 minutes and feeling remarkable lost, I saw the music teacher from my school. Fortunately she put 2 + 2 together and came up with 4! So she dragged us upstairs into a fish restaurant and then we found Mr & Mrs Kim and their gorgeous children. His daughter is a hello kitty style princess and his son was very cute - even asleep.

So we were fed a second lunch of fish, sushi, mystery fish and mystery fish bits. I'm telling you some of that stuff was awful!!! Sadly while raw fish is popular here, it is served in a somewhat heavy handed style both in flavours and in cuts. So it's not sushi, it's cho bap. We chatted with some children who were dragged to us to practise their english and then there was a little boy. He came over to us and we had a conversation. He was quite amazing - given he was 7 or 8 years old! He was so fluent that when he dropped some fish he said "oops!" - which was very funny at the time.

When we got home we were feeling very fat. Mike failed to deliver on the icecream birthday cake that I'd told him I wanted. Oh well, next time we're in Seoul, he's going to get me an incredibly cute icecream cake! With a bit of luck we'll have a few friends to share it with.

What did Mike get me?? Well a pair of children's earrings, they are very cute little gold cats and apparently a place holder for my proper birthday present. Shame he wasn't feeling overly generous when I found the Tiffany's white gold and diamond earrings in Seoul...

Oh and my favourite podcast (Cool) Shite on the Tube they sent me a happy birthday message! It was really sweet of them and makes me love them more. Thanks guys!!

We've been down to Daegu mainly for shopping and seeing some culture. We've taken it easy and been to the car show in Seoul. If you follow the car show link, you'll see my comments with all the booth babes draped across the cars. We played which is the ugliest car and the prettiest booth babe. It was fun even if it was a bit surreal.

With any luck, this weekend we'll see a movie at a cinema. I had hoped to watch Spiderman 3 but now I'm thinking 300 or Teenage Mutant Turtles would be better.

have a great weekend,
Squeezy